What this means for learners
SAMA and Balinese share 16 sounds — roughly 50% of Balinese's inventory overlaps with SAMA. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 8 sounds found only in Balinese represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for SAMA 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, SAMA has 16 sounds not used in Balinese. Native Balinese speakers learning SAMA 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.