When I learned modern Chinese, it had only sentence breaks. Individual words are one to four syllables and not separated.  It takes a while to handle this.  This would be like eliminating spaces in English.
Chinese before 1900 is even worse. They didnt have sentence and paragraph breaks, leaving one large grid of characters. And the grid can go in any of four directions: vertical horizontal, rightwise, leftwise. Ancient Latin and Torahanic Hebrew is like this too.