Only in Bengali 56
What this means for learners
Bengali and Russian share 16 sounds — roughly 22% of Russian's inventory overlaps with Bengali. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 26 sounds found only in Russian represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for Bengali 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, Bengali has 56 sounds not used in Russian. Native Russian speakers learning Bengali 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.