New Strategy for Learning Chinese Characters

I have been studying how best to dramatically increase my learned Chinese character vocabulary and have come up with a plan that might just provide explosive growth.  The key is in breaking down a character into its component two parts: radical and phonetic.  The radical part of a character, besides placing it in its proper order in traditional Chinese dictionaries, also categorizes it according to its general meaning.  The phonetic part, on the other hand, only hints at the character's pronunciation. Take, for example, the chemical element for neon.  Neon, being a gas at room temperature, carries the radical 气 for that meaning (gas/vapor/air), while its pronunciation of nai (third tone) carries the phonetic 乃, which other characters of similar pronunciation but different meaning carry.  Together, they constitute the composite character 氖 for neon.  This is a character building principle that pervades Chinese.

My plan is to use an old Chinese-English dictionary that does a good job of breaking down each of the 5,000 characters it contains into radicals and phonetics.  Only instead of the systematically classified and numbered radicals that are usually ordered in dictionaries, I will categorize the characters according to their phonetics.  I believe this will make my memorization more enduring and will also aid me when I encounter an unfamiliar character in regular text.