Glad you think so, because I DID live in Beijing and I have never heard/ heard of this.
Maybe what you heard was
Ni men hao
where men is the plural suffix and has the neutral tone.
Ni = you (singular), nimen = y’all.
After six months of Chinese, the only thing I remember is Ni Hao Ma…please don’t tell me my one and only Chinese sentence is wrong!!!
(Does Ni Ma Bu Ma mean Are you tired? - that would be the second sentence I learned, but I am not sure anymore.)
In German, there is no inflection upwards at the end of a question.
I don’t know of any Ma that means tired, but then my Chinese isn’t that great…
This is why I’ve sometimes had a hard time telling when Germans speaking English are asking me a question. When they’re speaking German it’s easy to tell from the verb position whether the sentence is a question or not, but since English word order is more flexible it can be hard to tell without a “questioning tone”.
In Japanese there is no change in tone.
Making a question in Japanese is quite easy… just put ka at the end of the sentence… Of course, the young new generation has a way of speaking that doens’t follow Japanese learned in school.
Ummmm, Can I think for a bit?
Yes. definitly rising.
How strange.
German and Dutch look a bit alike [for an outsider], but our sentences do go up when questioning. Cool.
maybe you are remembering ni mang bu mang? Are you busy. Ni lei bu lei would be are you tired.
Jomo Mojo, you probably found the smoking gun. I mean the Beijingese speak pretty nasty Mandarin as it is (you know, the regular street tu hua), and if they started asking questions like this I would probably never ever want to go back up there.
Ni men hao was what I thought Monty wrote. I should read what’s written 
Thanks China Guy…but now I am really confused…I’m sure you are right about ni mang bu mang…but I could’ve sworn my teacher (brilliant woman from Taiwan) told me it meant “Are you tired?”
Then again, as is very obvious, I was not her star student. At the beginning of the classes, she told me I would be able to speak simple Chinese in about a year. After 4 weeks, she changed her tune and told me it would take me a good 2-3 years.
Good news is that after failing miserably in Chinese, learning German was a snap!
And from my earlier post, I think the reason German is not inflected up at the end comes from the fact that usually, all the verbs are tacked onto the end of the sentence, making it difficult to play with inflections. You can have 2, 3, 4 and more verbs back to back at the end…try doing that and adding a lilt to your voice at the same time - someone could get hurt!
China:
I believe Jomo’s got it right. I must’ve misheard.
EJ:
I can speak from personal experience in Tokyo. Japanese does use a rising tone for some questions, especially in the so called vernacular. So desu ka?
Haha, China Guy. The classic battle between Beijing and Shanghai. I don’t disagree that some of the vernacular in Beijing is a bit messed.
As someone mentioned before, I believe that English people usually put a downwards inflection when asking questions. I’ll have to pay attention to it tomorrow (have an English coworker), but also my sister in law once lived in England for a time.
Or you could say that schools don’t teach Japanese the way it’s used in real life…
BTW, China Guy; nobody “told me” that “whopper.” It’s the way I was hearing (in this case, apparently) mishearing it.
my two cents:
In Brazilian portuguese…you have a descending inflection at the end of a sentence…(not sure if that is the right term, but hopefully you understand)
por exemplo:
O que onde? (where is he/she?)
pronounced
oh KAY OWNjay? (with the emphasis on the second to last syllable…
This is in the “carioca” or Rio de Janeiro accent.
Whilst a generic Aussie accent does use rising inflections for questions, in stereotypical Kiwispeak all sentences end in rising infections.
Hmmm…I somehow missed this thread first time round. I just wanted to reiterate and expound on something said earlier. I’ve taught English before and was a little bit surprised to realize that we don’t put rising inflection at the end of all questions. In fact, all the who,what,when,where,how, and why questions, the last syllable generally falls. Take for instance the difference between:
“Who am I?” (I’ve just been conked on the head, and I can’t remember.)
and
“Who am I?” (What? You don’t recognize me, the most powerful man in Effingham?)
Now, I, for instance, would pronounce “How’s your family.” and “How’s your family?” the same way (Perhaps a little more emphasis on “How” in the question). At least “family” wouldn’t get the same rising intonation as in “Is that your family?”
Of course, I’m sure different English dialects have slightly different patterns, but this seems to jive with my observations.