My wife and I have been studying Chinese casually for a couple of years now and I have been using Chinese Pod for almost a year.  It is very slow going, but I plan on keeping at it. 

I liked the elementary lesson, "The Panda's Secret Wish" and worked on it for the last week until I could say it to a Chinese co-worker.  The roughest spots were that she could not understand "yuan" of "yuan wang" (wish) and "cai" of "cai se" (color).  It was extremely frustrating as I tried to repeat each of these from her corrections but never got them right.  I cannot understand from her explanations what I am doing incorrectly.  The "yuan" seems to be the oo sound and not the inflection, which I'm pretty sure I'm getting right.  The "cai" she says sounds too much like "zai".  I am thinking "ts" and it sounds to me like I'm softer than "dz" but obviously I'm not getting it.

Any specific help on pronouncing these two words would be much appreciated and if there are resources for just getting better at pronouncing words, I would also appreciate that.

Following is a really good website for better Mandarin pronunciation:

www.speakchineseonline.com

I've been looking for a site like this for a while.  What's so great about it is that it describes each pinyin initial and final, using animation with sound, step-by-step description (with visual of what the lips, mouth, tongue, etc. do), and video/audio of an actual native speaker.

It's similar to CPod's Pinyin Chart, but with video and better description of what the mouth does.  There's other good info. on this site as well.

I have both heard in my own experience and from Shanghaiese that they don't distinguish between "en" or "eng", and "in" or "ing" very well. You might be aware that these distinctions are quite natural for English speakers, where "keen" and "king" are definitely distinct sounding, as are "ton" and "tongue". In many of the podcasts, I have to figure out by context much of the time whether a new word I'm hearing is "ten" or "teng", "pin" or "ping", "xin" or "xing", etc. because if the speaker is a Shanghai native, I just hear "ten", "pin", or "xin" respectively regardless. So, my suggestion is that English speakers will have an easier time of listening to new words if these pronunciations are more standard. There still is great value in listening to several accents, but more useful when a good foundation is already in place.

As an aside, I've noticed that ShanDong speakers accents even exaggerate the differences I've pointed out, to the point where "ying" sounds like "young" to an English ear.

Our app which designed to help none Chinese speaking people learn the pronunciation of pinyin has now available on Apple App Store.

It also can convert any Chinese character to it’s pinyin syllable.

It maybe useful for newbie chinese learners.

If you are interested in the app you can download it from this link: http://itunes.com/apps/PinyinPro

You can send me a email to get one promotion code, with this code you can download the app for free from the US Apple App Store.

Note: you must have account in US Apple App Store.

If you have any question or advice about the app, please let me know to help us improve the app.