I found this interesting. Here's a list of the most common 3000 Chinese characters, in order of frequency. Would make a great Skritter vocabulary list, methinks.

http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html

It would probably be pretty easy to make a list for that, but a 3000 character list strikes me as large enough that it may cause issues?

I think it is better to take those 3000 most common and group them by similar strokes, which is what "Remembering Simplified Hanzi 1" by James W. Heisig has done (and is an available list on Skritter). From my experience it allows the user to absorb the information quicker by allowing them to distinguish minor differences between characters.

I've run across that list before and it is certainly interesting to see the most common characters.

My understanding is that Remembering the Simplified Hanzi Book 1 is rather just the first 1500 characters?

Seems the rest are in a book 2 which isn't out?

@Byzanti: That is correct. I actually e-mailed the publishers about it as their website alludes to its creation. Then again book 1 was being asked about back in 2004, but wasn't released until 2008 haha.

I guess it wouldn't hurt to post that list anyways though. A simple macro could read down the page and capture all the hanzi listed in their respective orders.

I actually just got a response back from the publisher on the status of book 2.

"We may have the 2nd edition available in the spring of 2010. You will have to check back with us then."

@thegiffman: Some time ago I added two lists along these lines, 1000 Most Frequent and 1001-2000th Most Frequent. It looks like kubus has done even better and has added "Most Common Characters" lists up to 4000-4500. So I wouldn't bother reinventing the wheel, just use the existing lists, unless you think that specific list is better for some reason. You can look for them in "Custom Lists".

James

I prefer word lists than character lists, ordered by usability. And when I say word lists, I mean "one char words", "two char words", "three char words" and beyond...

的 is ALWAYS the most used character in Chinese but it is nowhere among the top ten in actual word lists, which I find much more useful (and harder to find on the internet).

@qingdaodragon - do any of the lists mentioned here fit the bill?

http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-901.html

http://technology.chtsai.org/wordlist/

For two-character combinations, look at the "Bigrams" part of

http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/

James

@jww1066: Do you know if kubus made a "0-500th Most Frequent Character" list? I see as low as 50-1000, but can't find the "beginning". :(

Sorry to be late to this thread--here's the first 1000 characters by frequency, 莉絲婷:

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=agVza3JpdHIWCxINVm9jYWJMaXN0SW5mbxja8oAEDA

Qingdaodragon, I've got a fairly general tool that I've built to order any collection of words by "importance to learners". It's not strictly "usability", but it's a combination of standard usage frequencies (for both single characters and words) with the prominence given to the word in all the textbook lists we have, weighted by level of the textbook.

I used that on the HSK lists we have, so insofar as the HSK lists aren't skipping over useful words, they should be a pretty well-ordered for your purposes. (They do skip over some useful words, though.)