Intermediate Chinese

Language strategists pls help---it's about Chinese. My weak point was always vocab, vocab, vocab... and recognising the characters.

So, /lang/ I have a wonderful list of Chinese characters here, namely the 3000 most commonly used (that Jun Da-list); I have a neat vocab-program to drill through the list. I also have a 3000 entries long word list of contemporary Chinese vocabulary. The difference is: one list contains the single characters, the other contains the bigram words (with two characters).

Which one should I learn first?

Learn the two-character words first. You'll effectively remember single characters by just remembering compound words. At least that worked well for me in Japanese.

Also I suggest learning traditional rather than simplified, as it gives better understanding of how characters evolved.