Brilliant! You REALLY need to get that info over to someone who
   can fix the way that Chinese is considered in English countries
   because our bias is showing and I never saw it 'til you pointed
   it out just there. After all, what makes their "intonations" any
   stranger than our "vowels"? Nothing. They're the same. " Way
   back when I was studying Chinese, we were taught that
   intonations were relevant to the dialect, and might change the
   meaning of an utterance with similar pronunciation from that
   language. Back to English.
   We are, or at least I was, taught that the vowel is 'a, e, i, o,
   u,' and sometimes 'y'. Question: What makes a vowel a vowel, if
   not intonations? Reverse culture shock!"* - not me
   *