Also, the reason the words are emphasized, and that they seem shouted to English speakers, is the nature of words and their pronunciation in a tonal language. In English you don't really know if something is a question until the very end of a sentence? In Spanish there's a greater diversity of tone, but it's still nothing compared to Asian languages where every phonetic can have the rising tone of a question, the falling tone of disappointment, or 3-5 other tones that are going to be difficult to even try to explain. ???<br/><br/>My exposure to Chinese is pretty limited, I'm not even sure how tonal it is compared to Thai. I just know that it is tonal.