This just melts my heart  

As a bit of trivia from someone who's studying Japanese: this is wrong. Japanese isn't a tonal language, as such how you pronounce a word isn't changing any meaning. A japanese person might look at you funny, but he'd perfectly understand what you just said for as long as you didn't talk in unintelligible grunts or something.

Chinese on the other hand ...

This made my day. The phonology nut in me is having seizures right now from so much awesome. I became a speech path for employability and patient interaction, but deep down, there's a part of me that wishes I'd gone after a linguistics PhD.

For Leighzard

Such a catchy song!
It made me think of this one.