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 radicals. helps a ton when you can just say "oh, this char is made of the much smaller and more manageable characters."