I was in a situation where I wanted to let the other person know that whatever they said was not fair to me or to the point we were discussing so I used "This is not very fair" and then realised may be I was wrong in terms of sentence usage. Please suggest which one should be used.
Answer
Both of your variants
not very fair
very not fair
are understandable to mean someone is not being reasonable.
However, from my experience (this is a disclaimer), a difference might be that
unfair
not fair
not very fair
completely unfair
implies levels or degrees or unfairness, which gets used by AmE speakers, whereas when a BrE speaker says
That is not fair!
the understanding is that culturally it's binary, since something either is fair or it is not fair.
It can be followed by
That is not fair!
That is just not on!
So, to me, very not fair, sounds possibly BrE. "Very" also emphasises the "not fairness" aspect.
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