What this means for learners
Yakut and Japanese share 30 sounds — roughly 61% of Japanese's inventory overlaps with Yakut. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
The 10 sounds found only in Japanese represent the greatest pronunciation challenge for Yakut 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, Yakut has 19 sounds not used in Japanese. Native Japanese speakers learning Yakut 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.