This study examined whether certain categories of Chinese characters were more difficult to learn and whether the phonetic component found in some characters plays an important role for children learning to read Chinese. Participants were 3655 Chinese students from grade 1 through 9.  Results indicated that there is a statistically significant relation between grade and character recognition ability at the elementary level, but not in junior high, and that some categories were significantly more difficult to recognize than others.  The rank order of the character difficulty for categories, from hard to easy, was phonetic complex > logical aggregates > imitative drafts = indicative letters.  Thus, the Chinese characters in the phonetic complex category are more difficult than the characters in the other three categories.  When this category was further broken into five Subtypes, there were significant differences in recognition accuracy among these Subtypes.  According to the results, students have the best accuracy of word recognition when the Chinese character with a different pronunciation than the phonetic component and have the worst accuracy of word recognition when the Chinese characters with the same pronunciation as the phonetic component.