I realized too late that it doesn’t have consistent furigana, but oh well. I transcribed it here:
花びらのように散りゆく中で夢みたいに君に出逢えーたキセキ～
There are 7 kanji, 4 of which I understand even at my modest level, which is cool. I somehow know 夢 from the ramen place, so that’s almost all of them, yay~
As you can see from my annotations, I sort of translate it as:
花びらのように: Like flower petals に
散りゆく中で: 散る is fall, ゆく at the end of a ます form means sort of ‘gradually’ (?), 中で: during; all in all: while I was falling
夢みたいに: I want (たい) to dream of に
君に出逢えーた: met you
キセキ: Kiseki
While I was falling like flower petals, I want to dream of how I met you, Kiseki.
The first bit sort of makes semantic sense, since petals fall. I think I struggle a bit with the first two に particles. What do they denote? Like petals に? I want to do x に? The dream part seems especially iffy to me, because the に is after a conjugated form.
It’s sometimes a bit unclear to me how to figure out what is going on without asking humans on a board. Maybe I’m missing some grammar or maybe I’m not putting 1 and 1 together but once I found all the meaning of words, my toolbox is kind of done.
How do you deal with (on your level) complicated sentences where the exact meaning is eluding you more due to syntactical issues rather than semantic ones?
散り can also mean “to wither”, so could be one of those double meanings. I did find some translations of the original song, that used that meaning, though it’s not common.
The more common is how @NicoleIsEnough translated it.
It’s a song Thanks @Gorbit99 and @NicoleIsEnough.
Now it makes a lot more sense why it’s so ‘pieced together’, these are stanzas! How did y’all realize, haha.
I should’ve realize the みたい bit means ‘like’. Could the first line also be 花びらみたいに or the fourth vice versa 夢のように?
Why is キセキ in katakana? Jisho doesn’t indicate that.
indeed, みたい is more casual, they are used like this most likely in order to avoid repeating words.
Happens with some words, especially animal words and the such, it’s probably either missing from jisho, or it’s not common enough to include.
It smells like poetry. I originally thought it was some kind of haiku-adjacent thing, but the 〜 at the end most often signifies singing. (and actually, the ー in 出逢えーた is probably also just a way of showing lengthening)
Somehow, 奇跡 is relatively common to be in Katakana (perhaps because it is a word that feels special); and it feels unlikely for キセキ to be a name here.
散りゆく is probably beginning to fall and scatter of flower petals (just like). See, ～て行く. (Not using て-form confuses me as well, but I am glad that I have found an explanation.)
Although I think it cannot mean “scattering like a dream” because for it to mean that, the dream would need to come before the scattering in Japanese.
Also for the very last bit, in the Japanese the miracle is qualified by the “meeting you”. (i.e. “the miracle of having met you”). This could be accepted as a liberal translation, though.
Despite those minor glitches, I think it’s really great!
Yeah, but chatgpt will tell you absolutely wrong things about Japanese in the exact same super-confident way. For instance, in the screenshot you show it just claimed that 散らす is the causative of 散る, when in fact it a different verb, and the causative would be 散らせる. And it romanised 君 as ‘kun’ when here it should be ‘kimi’.
If you can’t trust its explanations, how can you usefully use them?
The specifics of this sentence have been covered, so I’ll give you my answer to the general question – I just don’t worry too much about that sentence, and move on in the book. It probably isn’t that important to the overall meaning; or the following text might narrow down and make it clearer what’s going on.
Generally I think “I looked up all the words and it still didn’t make sense” cases are where the sentence has multiple confusing things all happening at once: maybe it’s a bit abstract, and it’s using a grammar pattern you’re not familiar with, and there’s some dialect. Rather than trying to understand these in this sentence, I prefer to move on and assume that at some point I’ll find a sentence that only has one of these confusing things, not lots – and that sentence will be the one that helps me to learn.
You might also want to consider adding a grammar reference to your toolbox so you can check “is this confusing because I didn’t recognise that this is a grammar point I haven’t seen before?”. (More important if you’re learning ‘immersion first’; less important if you’re also working through textbooks etc that will eventually show you most of the major grammar stuff anyway.)
While I was falling like flower petals, I want to dream of how I met you, Kiseki.
except for the last line
song 
