Which tones are hardest, why, and where to start.
Japanese speakers struggle most with Tone 3 and typically produce it as Tone 2. Two measurable causes: the turning point of their T3 occurs too early (natives turn later in the syllable), and their T3 endpoint is too high; listeners then hear T2. Japanese is a mora-based pitch-accent language, so its prosody does not map onto Mandarin's syllable-based lexical tone, and L-H-L accent patterns get transferred.
Source: Tu, Hsiung, Wu & Sung (2014), Error patterns of Mandarin disyllabic tones by Japanese learners, Interspeech 2014, 2558–2562. DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2014-548 | Wu et al. (2024), Interspeech 2024 | Zhu, Zhang & Yoshimoto (2012), TAL 2012 | Zou et al. (2012), Speech Prosody 2012
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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