Which tones are hardest, why, and where to start.
English speakers have no lexical tone system, so tones are an entirely new category; their difficulty concentrates on Tone 2 and Tone 3, most often confusing T2 with T3. T1 and T4 also get confused with each other. The root cause is that English uses pitch for sentence intonation, not word meaning: the final rise of an English question is mapped onto T2 [35] and the final fall of a statement onto T4 [51].
Source: Hao (2012), Journal of Phonetics 40(2), 269–279. DOI: 10.1016/j.wocn.2011.11.001 | So & Best (2010), Language and Speech 53(2), 273–293. DOI: 10.1177/0023830909357156 | Cui & Zhao (2026), Frontiers in Psychology 16. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1670858
Group averages tell you where to look, not what you actually do. Two speakers of the same first language can differ a lot. The only way to know is to record yourself and compare.
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