噎死，为日 烦你！

This is pretty obvious, I think. As a teacher, you need to find whatever method works for your students. If some of them have learnt French (or Swedish for that matter), it’s easy to say that Pinyin ü is close to the sound in these other languages. But only a gravely incompetent teacher would use this as the only way of teaching the sound, unless all students speak those languages.

When I started learning Chinese, I had a teacher who spoke dozens of languages and he dropped references all over the place. This grammar patterns is like this is German, this sound is like this in French, and so on. However, he also paired this with a survey of the students so he knew who knew what language.

By the way, that whole thread contains a ton of good arguments for why we shouldn’t say things like “it’s like X in language Y”, because like I said in the article here, it’s seldom correct. You can’t even trust educated teacher to be right here.

Let’s switch to “pin” and “spin”, because those have closer counterparts in Mandarin. The stop in “pin” has aspiration, a puff of air after it, and a later voice onset time, meaning that it takes longer from the release of the air to the start of the voicing. This would be close to “p” in Mandarin, e.g. 拼 (pīn). The stop in “spin” does not have that small puff of air and has an earlier voice onset time, which is closer to “b” in Mandarin, e.g. 宾 (bīn). Here’s an article for you if you want to read more: Buy a pie for the spy.

So Brits are the only people who learn Chinese? There are only 60 million of them in the world. This is less than the population of most Chinese provinces. How many are in China learning Chinese?

It’s just blastingly poor pedagogy, which the teaching of Chinese is shot through with. It’s shockingly poorly done in most cases. It’s the “well I speak French, I didn’t even bother to think that other people might not” attitude. It’s Pauline Kael Syndrome.

It is not as unwarranted as you make it to be. Many Brits learn French at school and many people learning Chinese use English resources (even if they aren’t English natives themselves) and these references to other languages might help them more than English equivalent. In the example you provided somebody mentions Russian ‘ж’ as good equivalent to Chinese ‘sh’. I think the main issue is many teachers don’t know the difference between sounds (they don’t hear it) and find technical detail boring, so they don’t learn and tell their students what they think is true.

Good morning
gǔdémāoníng
古德猫宁

Thank you
sānkèyóu
三克油

Strong
sǐzhuàng
死壮

Guess
gāisǐ
该死

Dress
zhuàisǐ
拽死

Yes
yēsǐ
噎死

Ambulance
ǎnbùnéngsǐ
俺不能死

Night
nàitè
奈特

Hands
hànzi
汉子

Banana
bān nànà
班呐呐

Name
nèimǔ
内母

Observant readers will have noticed that these also generally mean something in Chinese, which makes it even more amusing!