[kian]

They are slant rhymes of one another. B and M are phonetically nearby, as are ia and ih and ao and ou. In no way like hacker news and cake her knees -- but more like hacker news and hagger moos ;)

[OJFord]

I stand by 'ish' - B is plosive & M is not; that difference is if anything more apparent in Mandarin than English.

Then 'im' is read flat and not like 'ià'.

Of course 'bo' is quite like 'bāo', but that's your 'ish'.

[carrotcarrot]

Are you a native Chinese speaker?

I've noticed Chinese are very loose with their puns, and it helps that there is a lot of regional dialect variation in pronunciation.

For example a common one is 520 (wu er ling) being used for "wo ai ni" (I love you)

So I wouldn't put it past them to consider the two words as "similar"