What kind of resources should a beginner look for to help with similarly pronounced words?
Have you had problems noticing the difference between &quot;sheer&quot; and &quot;cheer&quot;, or &quot;jeep&quot; and &quot;cheap&quot;? If not, then your problem is solved. For European people, it is strongly recommended that they read articles with Pinyin (literally &quot;Spelled Pronunciation&quot;). 
Why characters are not relevant to their pronunciations? Chinese has so LONG a history that pronunciations have been changed for dozens (if not hundreds) of times. Even a Chinese can't figure out why 工(gong, &quot;work&quot;) represents the pronunciation of 江(jiang, &quot;river&quot;). Logically it should be, but it is not! Then Pinyin was invented to represent the pronunciation of characters. We only need to accept the fact and remember it. Leave the questions to linguists. 
One more thing: You can find quite a lot of texts with Pinyin in children's books. Chinese textbooks of Grade 1 or 2 in primary schools also help. (Confucius said, you should not feel ashamed to learn from people inferior to you. ;-))
EDIT:  I mean the difference of consonants, not vowels. Vowels in Mandarin Chinese is quite easy to distinguish.