0118 999 881 999 119 7253 | The IT Crowd

The citation refers to the existence of tones. The rest of the quoted text is from the author's observations as a language student. Tones don't provide an extra layer of communication, they're part of the natural pronunciation. Fluent speakers think about tones about as much as English speakers think about long/short vowels. Even with that aside, the author's idea that tones can be a natural mnemonic device of sorts has some logical problems. Yes, one might use tones as an additional memory anchor, but you'd still need to memorize the actual number along with the "tune", and you could do the same in English: [this video] Given the number 5316742918 (typical length of a phone number), you'd need to consciously go back and digit-by-digit take note of the tones. If you convert and hum the "tune", it'd go something like this: u--\--\\u-- or, numerically, 31141144311.* This requires conscious effort to convert and memorize already, but now we have no way to convert back to the original value as the tune could refer to any of 442,368 different numbers. *Tones map to digits as follows: 1: 1, 3, 7, 8 3: 5, 9 4: 2, 4, 6

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 :) You don't normally use it for numbers but you certainly can, see: [this video] 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 :)