Only in Italian 39
What this means for learners
Italian and Tigrinya share 31 sounds — roughly 44% of Tigrinya's inventory overlaps with Italian. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 35 sounds found only in Tigrinya represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for Italian 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, Italian has 39 sounds not used in Tigrinya. Native Tigrinya speakers learning Italian 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.