Based on The Authorized Table of Mandarin Words with Variant Pronunciations and Syllabus of Graded words Characters for Chinese Proficiency， this paper analyzes some words with variant pronunciations among international students. The investigation shows that the difficulty of learning Mandarin words which have variant pronunciations is similar middle-level and for high-level students. To make the process easier for students we can simplify the words of two categories: one， where there is a difference of pronunciation between the spoken and written language， and two， where there is little difference in actual meaning between the two pronunciations.