This article reports the findings of research on the acquisition of French consonants by native speakers of Cantonese. An error analysis based on a careful phonetic transcription of production data resulted in a scale of difficulty of consonants in both initial and final positions. Several of the major patterns of difficulty are explained by the Markedness Differential Hypothesis. On the basis of errors found, and which are not perfectly predicted by this theory, it is shown that there is an interaction of language acquisition with markedness reversals.