The importance of Chinese as a foreign language is rapidly increasing in Europe, including northern Europe. However, the endeavor to teach Chinese as a foreign language in Nordic countries faces a different set of challenges than, for instance, the teaching of English does, yet not much research has been conducted on the teaching and learning Chinese in these countries.
This paper reports an experimental study in which the perception of Mandarin tones by university students in three Nordic countries (Danmark, Finland and Sweden) is examined. Students enrolled in beginning-level Chinese courses at three universities participated in identification tasks. Students’ performance is analyzed in terms of accuracy percentages, confusion matrices and error patterns. The results reveal a rather consistent error pattern among students from these three countries overall, with minor variations. Interestingly, Nordic students display a quite unique error pattern that differs from the patterns observed for native English learners in similar studies from the literature. Findings of this study will be discussed from the perspective of learners’ language background, and recommendations and potential strategies for teaching Mandarin tones to students in Nordic countries will also be addressed.