This paper presents the results of a comprehensive study of the mutual intelligibility of Chinese, Dutch (both foreign-language learners) and American (native language) speakers of English. Intelligibility is tested at the level of the segment, word and sentence, after careful selection of representative speakers from the three language backgrounds. The results show that production and perception skills are generally correlated at all levels, that both speakers and listeners are more successful in the order Chinese < Dutch < American. Against this back-ground, however, intelligibility is unexpectedly good when speakers and listeners share the same mother tongue.