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Wading my way through rūju, I found the following phrase:

心慣じめない人にでも

Google couldn't parse it, so I tried doing so myself. 人にでも, read hito ni de mo, is the antecedent of the relative clause (hito) plus a few prepositions (particles in fact) inserting it into the song. The rest seems to be a noun and a verb. However, I was unable to find out how to read that, because taking 心慣 as a single noun would give me shinken or shinkan, but JEDict has no such noun, nor has Wiktionary, neither in English nor in Japanese nor in Chinese. I even tried guessing its meaning by finding a Chinese noun with identical spelling, but neither MDBG nor Baidu Baike nor the Chinese Wikipedia nor the Japanese one know about it. JEDict says nothing if I try a verb starting with 心慣じ, but knows a verb nareru and narasu and narawasu and narau starting with the second character which Google doesn't even transliterate. However, if the verb way is the right way to go, then I have another problem, since 心 will be read kokoro and the line would seem one syllable too long for the tune.

So what does this phrase mean, how is it pronounced, how should I parse that 心慣じめない?

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  • Random Googling yielded this, which has 心慣纵. Not a Chinese word though, as far as MDBG is concerned. Or Wiktionary. The herein linked xici page is extremely slow in loading, but here is a screenshot of part of it.
    – MickG
    Aug 1, 2015 at 13:28
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    If you're going to work from song lyrics online, you should probably listen to the song and hear what is actually sung. Lyrics online are wrong sometimes, and they don't always include furigana (it's very common in lyrics to give arbitrary readings for kanji compounds in furigana). Most places I can find the lyrics spell it 心馴染めない, by the way, so I wonder if it's not just a mistake on the webpage you found.
    – user1478
    Aug 2, 2015 at 0:19
  • Perhaps. I mean, I always thought of mojim as a Chinese song lyrics site, and I was rather surprised to see a Japanese song on it.
    – MickG
    Aug 2, 2015 at 7:23

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Basically, you have been looking in all the wrong places. If it had anything to do with Chinese, how would you explain the 「じめない」?

「心慣じめない」 should be the author's own way of writing 「心{こころ}馴染{なじ}めない」 for whatever his/her aesthetic purpose might be. 「馴染む」　is more standard　「馴染まない」 is only the negative form of it. Try looking up 「馴染む」, preferrably in a monolingual dictionary. I will tell you what it means in a minute, but it is more important that you look it up yourself as well.

「馴染む」 means "to get attached to".

「心馴染む」 means "to emotionally get attached to".

「心慣じめない人にでも」, therefore, would mean "even to/for the people that I could not emotionally become attached to". You could shorten that as needed. I am not going to try as English is not even my language.

If you are using song lyrics to learn Japanese, you would need to expect these kinds of non-standard ways of writing words to pop up occasionally.

In this video around 02:17, they even write it as 「心馴染めない」: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSGuEp1uFC0

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  • If I had found a noun with that spelling, the rest would have been a verb, and voilà another problem, probably :). So, a misspelled negative potential. I should have looked for a video of the song. What is so strange to you about the spelling 「心馴染めない」 where you say "they even write it as 「心馴染めない」"?
    – MickG
    Aug 1, 2015 at 14:49
  • This is only the second nonstandard spelling I find, the first one being 愛情 for just 愛 in this video at 0:32.
    – MickG
    Aug 1, 2015 at 14:50

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