歪に聞こえる

ibitu ni kikoeru to come across strangely, to sound wrong, to not make any sense

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Maybe it's because it's spring, but I'm suddenly hearing and learning a lot of new words and phrases in Japanese. I was talking about the challenge I face linguistically when I want to convey my ambitions and career needs in Japanese, something I normally would very rarely do. I've not heard many people do this in Japanese anyway, so issues like word choice are additionally challenging. Things that I would normally say in English don't necessarily make sense in Japanese, and trying to translate my thoughts from language to language can puzzle the listener. I was sharing this frustration and discussing new ways to talk about the future I see for myself with my (Japanese) husband, and as he commiserated with my challenge, he used the phrase above to surmise that the mentor I was working with would have had a hard time understanding what I wanted to say. As I investigated this, I realized that although I often run into the first character, it is usually in the context of a physical product deformation, because the Japanese verb associated with that character is 歪む (yugamu). So the phrase could literally be taken to mean: to sound twisted or deformed, to sound broken. This is one of the many times when I marvel at the ease with which you can paint incredible verbal pictures in Japanese.