Which tones are hardest, why, and where to start.
Thai is itself tonal, and Thai speakers are near-perfect on Tone 1 and Tone 4 — Thai's mid level and high falling tones map directly onto Mandarin T1 [55] and T4 [51]. Their real difficulty is Tone 2: T2 and T3 are predominantly misidentified as each other, and T2 tends to be produced with a late-turning fall-then-rise contour that collides with T3.
Source: Chow, Liu & Ning (2018), The Perception of Mandarin Tones by Thai and Indonesian Speakers, TAL 2018, 197–201. DOI: 10.21437/tal.2018-40 | Yang (2019), International Journal of Applied Linguistics 29(1), 3–16. DOI: 10.1111/ijal.12223 | Li (2023), TAI 2023. DOI: 10.21437/TAI.2023-22
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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