hello~Greg~~ there is a website that you can have a look.May be a little help：） http://www.chinese-tools.com/learn/chinese/01-phonetics-hello.html#h1

You can try adding pinyin to your flash cards to help remember the pronunciation. I find your comment "Also, I am having trouble making the same sound as my teacher. Is there a guide somewhere that shows me what I should do with my mouth, tongue, etc. so I can properly form each sound?". Surely that is what your teacher is for! If he/she is not showing you things like that, not picking up on your pronunciation problems and fixing them, I would be questioning if it was not time to look for a new teacher.

first memorize 410 syllables and then learn words by tone marks

I think the biggest problem is that, sometimes you cant find a similar pronunciation in English, or there are some slight differences between the pronunciation you think and the true pronunciation. I meet the same problem when learning English. 1. you should strengthen your Chinese soundmarks, the pronunciation is combined by those soundmarks. Especially pay attention to, "sh",'ch','c',"s","en","eng"....It is not easy to introduce the differences with characters. 2. Watching CCTV news is a nice way of learning the pronunciation. The comperes are the tops among China and they wont add dialects in their Chinese. 3. Accent is a problem too, I have heard many foreigners talking Chinese, the accents are strange, so you should concentrate on the tone of the sentences. They are quite different from English. Wish these will help you.

It is a problem for me too. Quite a long time I did not pay attention to the pronunciation, just tried to remember how to write characters. It's wrong. Now I pay GREAT attention to the pronunciation, my readbook covered with coloured spots, green means "ng" and red means "n", and lines up and straight and down. And I try listen a lot. Some beginners courses have exercises, you need by ear write down pinying. After two years hard working I can do this. So, add oil! I wonder what other people will answer to you. For me this is still urgent problem.