Seems like a waste not to add a kanji for shake we already have to know at this point as a practice?
How many times have you ran into 久し振り written in Kanji to where you think this is an important addition?
it’s same as with 有難う, no? The idea is to practice another kanji alongside
Hm, it’s true that learning any kanji use will reinforce the meaning, but some writings of words are so unused that it would perhaps be a detriment to focus on them as a learner. Besides, after learning 振る, I don’t find it too big a leap to infer the reading of 久し振り (I’ve never seen that writing before but knew what it was no issue).
To be fair, I suppose, Wanikani chooses to teach 有難う, but ありがとう itself is a much more common word than 久しぶり。
On a side note, I came across 有難う御座います in the wild for the first time recently. A person used it a few times it in an email to me. I asked my coworker about it because I wasn’t sure if I could use it in practice to be more formal, but he was strongly against it and told me it was best practice not to use as it is hard to look at. He told me it made the email look pretty strange. (Of course, that is just the opinion of one person).
I browse Pixiv Comic sometimes to read random freebie manga chapters. I’ve come across 久しぶり (more often) and 久し振り (less often), but mostly on anything that seems amateurish compared to the works that are cross-published from actual magazines. It seems to be mostly a consequence of the author just hitting the spacebar on their keyboard without thinking about it, since there are sometimes actual kanji typos. I’ve also seen it in manga that uses kanji heavily but puts furigana over everything.
I don’t think this is too outlandish of a request for WK considering that both 有る and 要る exist as (quite early) vocab, but it’s also definitely easier to pick up from context than those examples.
I think if they added 有難うwith the intent to “practice Kanji” it’s a poor addition as well.
To me it seems like 90% of its value is just in user’s being like “huh, you can write it in Kanji. Neat”. Comparatively speaking it’s not actually a valuable addition in terms of increasing users Japanese ability imo.