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I appreciate your call out, I would've had no idea.

Is the main idea still correct? I'm curious what technique Japanese speakers use to avoid collisions like the one referenced in the article.


No, TFA was a little vague but there's no collision. The kanji for mackerel 鯖 is a standalone word/idea, whose graphical representation happens to consist of the characters for "blue" and "fish" next to each other. But virtually all kanji are constructed this way, so native readers just see the overall word without considering the parts, similarly to how you'd read the word "notable" without mistaking it for "not able".
What collisions? You mean a kanji composed of two kanjis vs the two kanjis written separately but together?

There's no technique per se. It's just the character size.

Example:

好 vs 女子

Exactly, thanks for the information!
Chinese characters/Kanji are typically monospaced and characters are written within a box.

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