Shared sounds 41
What this means for learners
Hungarian and Tigrinya share 41 sounds — roughly 62% of Tigrinya's inventory overlaps with Hungarian. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 25 sounds found only in Tigrinya represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for Hungarian 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, Hungarian has 24 sounds not used in Tigrinya. Native Tigrinya speakers learning Hungarian 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.