What this means for learners
French and Javanese share 22 sounds — roughly 55% of Javanese's inventory overlaps with French. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 11 sounds found only in Javanese represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for French 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, French has 18 sounds not used in Javanese. Native Javanese speakers learning French 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.