Learning the first 1000 Chinese characters are the easiest. Moving from 1000 to 3000 characters is really hard. The first 1000 we reinforce seeing street signs when walking along the road, words in the menus, the newspaper headlines, subtitles on TV shows. But beyond that, we don't see the remaining 2000 in contexts often enough, and need to use flashcards and other more artificial methods to learn them.