Even non-tonal languages have melodies, for example English people use a lot of intonation compared for to my native Polish. When I was in UK everybody sounded like they were talking to infants or dogs :)
Another useful mnemonic that for me works even better than melody is rhythm. I noticed that I have about 20-notes buffer for last-heard rhythmic phrase even if I wasn't paying attention at the time. So for example after I ran down a flight of stairs I can count them by remembering the rhythm of my steps and adding them. My friend who has way better short term memory than me can't do this, but he can see the image he was looking at recently. Now that's cheating :)
> Even non-tonal languages have melodies, for example English people use a lot of intonation compared for to my native Polish. When I was in UK everybody sounded like they were talking to infants or dogs
It might just be more obvious since the English patterns are unfamiliar.
One of the more surreal experiences I've had was watching an English-language news broadcast in China. The presenter was speaking English and had obviously put in a lot of effort trying to learn what natural English sounded like. The general pattern of intonation over her sentences was quite realistic for English.
What made it surreal was that the intonation didn't match the words. Everything she said, it was like she was using the intonation pattern of some other sentence and applying it to a completely different sentence.
Polish has a lot of intonation—which is also kind of unique. I can instantly recognize people speaking Polish, even in larger groups of people talking all kind of languages, just by the very typical sentence melody that sticks out.
But it's indeed quite different to other languages, even the other Slavic ones.
Germanic intonation and sentence melody (for example like in German or English) is completely distinct from the Polish one. And this melody seems to be something sticky as you can always recognize Polish people just by their intonation even when they speak otherwise perfect German or English. That's not the case for for example Russian, or Czech, or Slovak people.
You don't normally use it for numbers but you certainly can, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ
Another useful mnemonic that for me works even better than melody is rhythm. I noticed that I have about 20-notes buffer for last-heard rhythmic phrase even if I wasn't paying attention at the time. So for example after I ran down a flight of stairs I can count them by remembering the rhythm of my steps and adding them. My friend who has way better short term memory than me can't do this, but he can see the image he was looking at recently. Now that's cheating :)