Chinese Words that Accurately Reflect English Phonemes I'm a retired computer science professor who helps Chinese graduate students master English. The students have a good background for reading and writing scientific papers but struggle with their teaching assignments. In all fairness, we're a Southern university with students who have no experience with non-Southern accents.

This semester I'm starting a new tack, which is to use games, especially tongue twisters, to find those sounds that the students have the most trouble with. Some English phonemes are well-known to be difficult but I find different students have trouble with different combinations of phonemes.

My question/request is this. I would like to find a list of Chinese words that contain correct English phoneme sounds. For example, one of my students is struggling with the "w" sound in "wood"; she's very frustrated because her name is Wu. I discovered looking at Chinese phonemes "w" is sometimes silent which is exactly the problem she's having: she wants to say "ood" and not "wood". Ditto for "would".

My goal is to make a table with (1) the English phoneme (2) a Chinese word that contains the English phoneme and the Pinyin version (so I can read it).

Thanks in advance. 

I have put together a google group with my attempt to set up my own answer. You can see is at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/cupronunce.  The basic approach is to 


Find a site that had English with the IPA listed
Find a site that had IPA to Pinyin
Find a site that had Pinyin to Mandarin


We know that it's a partial function each way, so the missing links are the parts to concentrate on fixing.

Any comments gratefully accepted.
I do not think that such a list exists. If it did, Chinese-speaking learners of English would never need to struggle with the pronunciation of their new language. Let's say we have a List E, which contains all the phonemes in English (whichever variety you choose), and another List C, which contains all the phonemes in Chinese (again, whichever variety you choose). Where E and C overlap, these are the phonemes that students will not likely have problems.  It's the part of E that is outside of C that your students need to tackle, and this is precisely the part where you cannot find Chinese words that contain those phonemes. The reverse is true for English-speaking learners of Chinese, that is, they tend to struggle with the part of C that is outside E. This is also why second-language speakers tend to have accents. They are trying to find a native sound that matches the new language sound, and where none exists, they approximate as much as they can, resulting in a distinct accent.