This paper reports on an empirical study examining the relationship between beginning-level CFL students’ tonal production and their awareness of lexical tonal categories. Additionally, it investigated CFL learners’ views about the relationship. A mixed method approach was adopted to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data from 23 beginning-level English-speaking adult CFL learners. The quantitative results show that the participants’ accuracy of lexical tonal production was statistically significantly correlated to their awareness of tonal categories and their tonal production was statistically more accurate than their awareness of tonal categories. The qualitative findings show that the participants didn’t rely on their awareness of tonal categories when conducting the production task. However, the participants stressed the importance of awareness of tonal categories in their tonal production, particularly when producing unfamiliar characters. Based on the discovered unique relationship, pedagogical suggestions for beginning-level CFL tonal development are offered.