The current paper discusses first investigations aimed to lay the groundwork for the development of computer-aided pronunciation training for teaching Mandarin to Germans. We conducted a contrastive analysis of the two languages leading to a set of tokens for a production and perception experiment involving German first-year students of Mandarin. Their data were perceptually evaluated by a teaching expert for Mandarin, native speakers of Mandarin as well as processed by a Mandarin automatic speech recognition system.