Only in Lithuanian 35
What this means for learners
Lithuanian and Kurdish share 25 sounds — roughly 42% of Kurdish's inventory overlaps with Lithuanian. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 14 sounds found only in Kurdish represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for Lithuanian 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, Lithuanian has 35 sounds not used in Kurdish. Native Kurdish speakers learning Lithuanian 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.