This paper addresses issues that concern both learning Chinese as a foreign languageand the didactics of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. It reports an experimental study thataims to establish the basic facts regarding the production of Mandarin tones by Swedish learners.10 Swedish learners who have studied Chinese for 3 to 4 terms were recruited to read monosyllabicChinese words and their pronunciation was subjected to both statistical and acoustic analyses, in orderto examine the students’ pronunciation (especially tones) and assess the levels of difficulty posed bythe four lexical tones respectively. It was found that Tone 3 is most challenging to Swedish learners,and Tone 1 is easiest for them to pronounce correctly. Moreover, Swedish speakers were most likelyto mispronounce Tone 1, Tone 3, and Tone 4 as Tone 2, and mispronounce Tone 2 as Tone 1. Threetone-error types were identified through acoustic analysis, and their distribution pattern lends furthersupport to the claim that level tone is easier to learn than contour tones. Based on these findings,pedagogical implications are addressed and recommendations for Chinese language teachers areformulated.