What this means for learners
POHNPEIAN and Assamese share 15 sounds — roughly 41% of Assamese's inventory overlaps with POHNPEIAN. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 22 sounds found only in Assamese represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for POHNPEIAN 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, POHNPEIAN has 5 sounds not used in Assamese. Native Assamese speakers learning POHNPEIAN 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.