Which tones are hardest, why, and where to start.
Hmong is a tone language (7-8 tones), but it transfers NEGATIVELY: Hmong speakers' Mandarin tone perception is significantly WORSE than that of English and Japanese speakers. Hmong's denser tonal inventory has no one-to-one mapping to Mandarin, so the two systems interfere. The deficit shows on T1, T2 and T4 — but not on T3.
Source: Wang, Xinchun (2006), Perception of L2 Tones: L1 Lexical Tone Experience May Not Help, Speech Prosody 2006, paper 240. DOI: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2006-25 | Wang (2013), The Modern Language Journal 97(1), 144–160. DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2013.01386.x
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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