About An Idiom ある慣用句について
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Does “Could I trouble you for a glass of water?” make sense to you?
“Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”という言い方は意味を成しますか?
That’s what I could hear someone say in an American drama.
アメリカのドラマを見ていてそう聞こえたのですが。
I’m not familiar with saying, “Could I trouble you~?”
“Could I trouble you~?”という言い方に馴染みがありません。
I’m not sure of whether the idiom is used often or not.
よく使われる慣用句なのかどうかもよく分かりません。
Note: My Japanese sentences are loose translations.
注意：日本語の文章は意訳です。
“Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”という言い方は意味を成しますか?
That’s what I could hear someone say in an American drama.
アメリカのドラマを見ていてそう聞こえたのですが。
I’m not familiar with saying, “Could I trouble you~?”
“Could I trouble you~?”という言い方に馴染みがありません。
I’m not sure of whether the idiom is used often or not.
よく使われる慣用句なのかどうかもよく分かりません。
Note: My Japanese sentences are loose translations.
注意：日本語の文章は意訳です。
Does “Could I trouble you for a glass of water?” make sense to you?
Yes it is fine.
American English tends to avoid self-deprecation. Because everything is always AWESOME.
America is a huge country, so it seems that each place has a lot of different usage that the other parts of America don't use.
That’s what I heard someone say in an American drama.
Another variant is "Sorry to trouble you, but could you..." (although the slightly less polite "Sorry to bother you, but could you..." is more common).
I think what I hear often are:
I don’t want to bother you, but~
I’m not going to bother you, but~
Is “What I think I hear often are” correct?
To express that nuance, you can say "That's what I thought I heard someone say in an American drama."
"I think what I hear often are X and Y"
"What I think I hear often are X and Y"
Both are correct. "I think what I hear..." puts slightly more emphasis on not being sure. Note that if you were only talking about one sentence or expression, "are" would be "is" instead.
Alternatives: "I think I hear the following expressions pretty often: ..." "I think I often hear the following expressions..."
That's fairly comprehensive. The only other really major dialectical regions in the US are the South and the Southwest.
(Florida is geographically southern, but the population is more than 80% transplanted Northerners who moved down there to get away from winter, and the local speech patterns reflect that.)
There's also the Pacific Northwest, but the dialect out there is mostly based on Midwestern speech with some California mixed in.
I find it difficult to imagine that a polite expression like "Could I trouble you..." would be used both in England and throughout most of America but not in the South, with Southern speech being famously more full of politeness than any other American regional dialect. Frankly, in the South they'd probably enhance it: "Honey, you know I hate to be a bother or anything, but could I maybe trouble you for just a teensy little favor?" To be absolutely sure I'd have to ask somebody who's lived in the South, but my best guess would be that they probably say this sort of thing in the South more than we do up North.
That leaves the Southwest. Unfortunately I don't know a great deal about Southwestern dialectical features (except for the obvious and highly distinctive systematic vowel sound shifts endemic to Texas).