Pronunciation is a part of language learning that is often given less attention compared to other parts such as grammar, writing, reading comprehension, and listening comprehension. This often results in non-standard or even inaccurate pronunciation.The present thesis is an attempt to help Indonesian speakers who are learning Mandarin as well as Mandarin teachers who teach Indonesian students. It is a comparative study, combined with the analyses of the mistakes made by Indonesian students of Mandarin in Hebei Teachers’ University.Making mistakes is part of learning the pronunciation of a foreign or even a second language. It is something natural because every language has its own sound system. One sound may be present in one language and the same sound may be absent in other languages. The absence of tones and some speech sounds of Mandarin in Indonesian give contribution to the arising of the difficulties in learning Mandarin pronunciation.The study discusses the sound systems of the two languages, Indonesian and Mandarin, using both phonetic and phonological approach. Nevertheless, the phonetic approach is more emphasised in this study, since the focus of the study is the actual speech instead of the representation of speech sounds of the particular languages. In other words, in this thesis, the allophones are more important than the phonemes.The study discovers that the most difficult sounds to pronounce by Indonesian speakers are Mandarin retroflexed fricatives and affricates. This is due to the absence of retroflex sounds in Indonesian language. The presence of tones in Mandarin is another hurdle for Indonesian speakers in learning Mandarin pronunciation.