What this means for learners
Pashto and Javanese share 24 sounds — roughly 63% of Javanese's inventory overlaps with Pashto. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 9 sounds found only in Javanese represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for Pashto 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, Pashto has 14 sounds not used in Javanese. Native Javanese speakers learning Pashto 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.