This article on Sinosplice discusses the question of how many characters you actually need to be able to read Chinese (no, the answer isn't 2,000). Of course, the main question is what you want to read and how well you want to understand it, but the general gist is that 3,000 will get you pretty far, but that you will need a lot more than that for full literacy. I also posted a comment to this post with my own reflections.