What this means for learners
Afrikaans and GERMAN share 23 sounds — roughly 56% of GERMAN's inventory overlaps with Afrikaans. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 18 sounds found only in GERMAN represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for Afrikaans speakers. The adult brain tends to map unfamiliar sounds onto the closest native equivalent — a process that produces the characteristic "accent" of a second-language speaker. Learning to hear and produce these sounds as distinct requires focused ear training, not just repetition.
Conversely, Afrikaans has 16 sounds not used in GERMAN. Native GERMAN speakers learning Afrikaans will face the mirror-image challenge with these sounds.
Phoneme inventories from PHOIBLE. Data reflects one documented inventory per language; some variation exists across dialects and sources.