Only in Romanian 26
What this means for learners
Romanian and Russian share 25 sounds — roughly 49% of Russian's inventory overlaps with Romanian. 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 Russian represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for Romanian 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, Romanian has 26 sounds not used in Russian. Native Russian speakers learning Romanian 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.