I worked through “Remembering Simplified Hanzi” and my one complaint is that I wish that it were “grouped by frequency” a bit more.
The way that these books work is that the first one is the most common ~1500 characters grouped by radical / component, and then the second one is the next most common ~1500 characters grouped the same way.
The problem is that this means that you have to learn 1500 characters before you know all of the most common 1500. I stopped after 1000 characters and was left not knowing many extremely common characters that hadn’t been introduced yet.
I think that a better organization would have been 500, 1000, 1500 instead of 1500, 1500.
Other than that, great books that I also recommend.
Tuttle "Learning Chinese Characters" by Matthews and Matthews is organized in the way you mention. I find it highly recommendable, although I can't compare to Heisig's book because I don't have that one.
It only has 800 characters, though. But they are the most common.
The first book actually only contains the most common (by their methodology) 1000 characters:
> "The 55 lessons from Book 1 cover the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the Chinese writing system, plus another 500 included either because they are needed to preserve the logical ordering of the material or because they are especially easy to learn at this early stage."
Those 500 are still from the most common ~3000 total that comprise both books at least, but it means that you really have to learn 1500 characters before you're guaranteed to know the most common 1000. And learn all 3000 before you're guaranteed to know the most common 1500.
I've been going so slowly it's taken me years to reach my current point of character #2170, but eventually I'll get there, even if I've already been reading sentences with characters that I haven't gotten to yet for a while now.
The way that these books work is that the first one is the most common ~1500 characters grouped by radical / component, and then the second one is the next most common ~1500 characters grouped the same way.
The problem is that this means that you have to learn 1500 characters before you know all of the most common 1500. I stopped after 1000 characters and was left not knowing many extremely common characters that hadn’t been introduced yet.
I think that a better organization would have been 500, 1000, 1500 instead of 1500, 1500.
Other than that, great books that I also recommend.