Hey,
I encountered this sentence during my reviews :
こんな無理を言ってすみません
Which is pretty simple, but I don’t understand how do we get the english translation :
“I’m sorry for asking you to do this difficult thing .”
As the verb is 言う I don’t understand why and how we get “asking you to do”
At first I thought that it meant something like “Sorry for saying this impossible thing.”
Thanks
無理を言う is a set phrase that means ‘to ask a huge favor’, or ‘to ask something unreasonable’. It doesn’t translate well into English unfortunately in its literal form, which would be ‘to bring up the unreasonable’.
I see, thanks !
These set phrases are hard to catch when we don’t know them at first.
I definitely agree with that! I think that it’s pretty safe to go with your instinct though with set phrases. Usually when I read something and the meaning doesn’t sound literal, there’s about an 80% chance that it’s some kind of set phrase. That’s what I have found in my own reading at least.