I think it should be more like "Roll a tin can down the stairs, then ask an English speaker to write down what it sounded like, and compare it to a random Chine

I think it should be more like "Roll a tin can down the stairs, then ask an English speaker to write down what it sounded like, and compare it to a random Chinese sentence." I'm afraid even then the results wouldn't be similar at all... In Czech we would transcribe it bum, cink, prásk, řach. Which doesn't look like pinyin at all. Incidentally, we also use a different transcription of Chinese, instead of Wo chadianr shuaidao le we would write Wo čcha-tien-(r) šuaj-tao le. This joke wouldn't work at all But your comment is really awesome.