Challenges in the foreign language acquisition of intonation often result from cross-linguistic differences. While German, for example, encodes contrastive focus via intonation (pitch accents), French typically employs a syntactic strategy (clefting). For these reasons, the present study investigates the intonational marking of contrastive focus in German using learners with French as their native language via recordings of read sentences from the IFCASL corpus. Productions of learners (34 beginners and 34 advanced learners) were prosodically analyzed (placement, type, and prominence of the accent), and compared to productions of 40 native speakers of German. Results revealed that though pitch accent types differed from those used by native speakers, learners generally succeeded in placing pitch accents on the contrastively focused element. However, by far the greatest difficulty for learners at all levels concerned the deaccentuation of non-focal elements. In this respect, advanced learners were more successful in reducing prosodic prominence in the pre-and post-focal regions. Our findings are crucial for developing tailored teaching materials that concentrate on non-focused elements to enhance learners’ mastery of target-like prosodic marking of contrastive focus.