Rather than let the comment thread get too messy, I’ll offer an answer, though I’m also going to suggest that it’s off-topic.

What people are saying is right: French has different sounds than English, even the ones that are spelled the same. If you learn a French word by reference to English sounds, it won’t be French.

So understandably you’ve tried to master those sounds using advice like “more like th than d“. I can see how that might be useful, in that you might end up pronouncing d with the tongue touching the back of the teeth where it should be. The end goal is fine.

But instead of wondering “What would a d sound like if it were more like a th?”, two common approaches for self-study are either to listen to the French sound over and over and repeat it back till it sounds the same, possibly by recording yourself and playing it back — or else learn the technical names for things, in this case a “dental stop”.

The advantage of these approaches is that you have a reference point and a model, and also, once you’ve learned how to make that sound you don’t need a new word explained from scratch.

However, if you want a shortcut and aren’t interested in mastering the French sounds, I suggest starting from an English word and tweaking it instead of going sound by sound. Here, I’d start with bared with an m: “mared”. Easy enough. If you want to improve the accuracy, try for the back-of-the-throat French r (for which there’s no English equivalent, by the way); the d with the tongue touching the back of the teeth; and a little puff of air after the d for extra emphasis, not required.

At the end of the day it depends how accurate you want to get. If you want a quick and easy version based on English, say “mared”. If you want an accurate pronunciation, take the time to learn the accent or the system rather than, to make an analogy, buying flea market knockoffs. 🙂