1000 Chinese Characters

I was once told that if you could memorize 1000 of the most used chinese characters, you would be able to read a newspaper without much problem. In view that i am a banana who is enrolling his son to a chinese school, i must be able to understand or able to teach him if he asks.

There has been several incidences where he asked me to read to him what was in his books but i was unfortunately and very disappointed with myself that i am not able to comply to such a simple wish :(

Since i do not have a co-pilot anymore so i have to suck it up and take up the challenge of learning one of the most complex language ever created with more than 50000 characters in its arsenal. Although i am not totally illiterate in chinese but i fall way short of 1000 characters. Perhaps at a max, i could get around 50-100 characters which is not good enough sometimes to read even the headlines =_="

With a little help from Google, i managed to find this site which offers a flash card like interface to help you learn chinese. I hope to be able to memorize the 1000 characters so i may be able to read a chinese newspaper or rather more importantly, able to read to my son :)