What this means for learners
Hausa and Mandingo share 26 sounds — roughly 57% of Mandingo's inventory overlaps with Hausa. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 8 sounds found only in Mandingo represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for Hausa 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, Hausa has 20 sounds not used in Mandingo. Native Mandingo speakers learning Hausa 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.