I am a native Chinese speaker, meanwhile, I can speak and write in Japanese and Korean. I have been researched on Japanese and Korean for several years.
Pronunciation in Mandarin Chinese is very difficult only because there are four different tones. The tone determines the meaning of a word. In other words, whereas we use intonation for emphasis in English, Chinese uses tones for the meaning of each sound. If we ignore the problem with tones, the actual sounds themselves are quite similar to many sounds in English. It’s not surprising that there are quite a few English speakers who are also wonderful speakers of Chinese. Dashan, a Canadian who has become a famous personality on TV in China can speak Chinese like a native speaker.
In order to master the tones, you have to do a lot of listening in order to acquire the intonation and rhythm of the Chinese language. Trying to remember the individual tone for each word I learned was too difficult. Trying to think of the tones in each word made me to unsure of myself when I wanted to speak. It is useful was to listen to comic dialogues in Chinese. Comedians exaggerate the intonation of a language, and by listening to them their rhythm can be infectious. If you can get the intonation and rhythm of a language, your ability to pronounce will improve.
On the other hand, Korean and Japanese are not tonal languages. It is not that difficult to pronounce. Acquiring correct pronunciation is, like listening comprehension, a function of how much time we put into listening, and developing the ability to notice how words are pronounced. In Japanese and Korean, there are so call Chinese pronunciation and the local pronunciation of the words, because Japanese and Korean borrowed plenty of words from ancient China and meanwhile, they have their own original words for expression.
Finally, I am going to show you guys an interesting video about the pronunciation differences among Chinese, Japanese and Korean on YouTube.
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