Thank you for letting me know! I’ll see if I can update the entire article while I’m at it.

Thank you for pointing this out! I have added the information to the article itself and referenced your comment.

In fact, mentally counting the number of strokes was how we used to memorise characters.

Now, of course, with dictionary apps, pinyin and other faster means of looking up characters is used and stroke number is obsolete.

I know of that list, but for some reason decided not to include it. I was actually looking for a frequency list from the Academia Sinica corpus, but couldn’t find anything officially published. The list you link to is close, but there’s so little information on how it was produced that it’s hard to know or use properly.

I think it comes from this: https://ckip.iis.sinica.edu.tw/project/sinicacorpus

For beginners and intermediate learners I recommend checking out the official word lists over at wordswing, interesting review can be done by playing games, viewing all words on one page etc..

I’ll check out the list you suggested! Regarding number of strokes, I think difficulty is not related to number of strokes at all. More strokes often make it easier to learn a character, not harder, at least for non-beginners. The real problem is not so much to learn a new character, which very likely consists of known components if it has a large number of strokes, but to keep the new characters separate from ones already known. Lots of strokes makes it harder to write, of course, but not harder to remember (in general, there are of course characters with many strokes that are also hard to remember). My comment here assumes that the student already knows the most common components, of course, otherwise characters with many strokes are obviously harder because they contain more unknown components.

https://wenku.baidu.com/view/a941b1e784254b35eefd3483.html
http://www.moe.gov.cn/ewebeditor/uploadfile/2015/01/13/20150113090418639.pdf

The characters should fall in a category like easy characters or possible character in itself components. I found the list by searching for a list of useful components, that are characters of their own. But I haven’t used it up to now, and there ist nothing like a frequency.

That brings me to an other point. You wonder about the usefulness of the number of strokes in a character. You can take this number as a measure for easyness of a character (as a rule of thumb – it’s far from perfect). With that you can create a ranking, that treats both easyness and frequency.