>We are so used to changing the pitch of a word to inflect meaning to the sentence that it is a hard habit to break.

On the other end of the spectrum there is Hungarian, which is colorful in any other way, but it doesn't have much of intonation, because it has seven vowels in short/long pairs, practically 14 of them, and the long ones tend to occupy the latter syllables of the words (many suffixes are long, and a word can have 4-5 of them), while the stroke is always on the first one. You can't get much of a melody that way, though you do hear it on the street (they can be as loud as Italians, at times). But if you listen to radio Budapest, it can be so flat that you don't know why has the guy stopped speaking - is he taking in some air, or is it to be a comma, or is he looking for a way to continue the sentence, is he confused? It all sounds the same, and you can't know what it meant until you hear what comes next, and when.

>I am told there is a sound in Arabic that if you don't start making in before you are 7 you will never get it correct.

In Serbian (aka srpski) it's the pronunciation of r, which is as always as hard as the Scottish or some Spanish can make it, but it can be a vowel, i.e. make a syllable. Note the name that the language calls itself - just like the parallel language in the 'hood - Croatian (hrvatski). If you don't learn to pronounce it by age of four, your parents start worrying. By age of six, you get recommended to a logoped(ist?).

Our third daughter now says that she was able to pronounce it, but wasn't sure where. She stopped pronouncing it as l after staying with her (much older) sister while listening to "Saucerful of secrets". She came out and said "I listened to some hollible music - Pink Froyd".