What this means for learners
NDUT and Garo share 9 sounds — roughly 26% of Garo's inventory overlaps with NDUT. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 17 sounds found only in Garo represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for NDUT 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, NDUT has 25 sounds not used in Garo. Native Garo speakers learning NDUT 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.