Only in Danish 50
What this means for learners
Danish and French share 19 sounds — roughly 28% of French's inventory overlaps with Danish. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 21 sounds found only in French represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for Danish 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, Danish has 50 sounds not used in French. Native French speakers learning Danish 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.