I would, however, add that traditional Chinese character learning involved the complete memorisation of a text, followed by learning the characters associated with each word of that text. Learning individual characters in the way we think of as "traditional" today is actually a modern innovation compared to how people used to do it. In that context, memorising a text that consists of 1000 purely unique characters takes on a different character, even though I would think people would be better served just memorising more useful texts.