I was thinking and thinking of what song I should first analyze when I finally decided why not do a analysis of the present top idol group?  Which brings us here, translating and breaking down the meaning of one part of Miracles in December.  Why this song?  Because the other songs "Mama, Growl, Wolf, History" all either have useless lyrics that no one can really apply (ahem...eating you in one bite like cheese is not relevant to our daily lives) or awkward English stuck in between.  So, let's begin:

Skipping to 00:48, we hear the chorus, where Chen sings "늘 나밖에 몰랐었던 이기적인 내가."  Now let's break it down.  Korean has the same sentence structure as Japanese.  The subject, the object, then the verb.  So what does the verse mean?

First, let's translate the sentence as is.  

"늘" or "neul" means always. 

"나밖에" or "nabakkae" means only me. "나" or "na" means me and "밖에" or "bakkae" means only (in this context).

"몰랐었던" or "mollasseotdeon" in this context means knew.  This phrase doesn't really make sense by itself, and neither does the one before.  Usually  나밖에 and 몰랐었던 would be connected. 몰랐었던 comes from 몰라 "molla", which means I don't know, and the actual meaning of 몰랐었던 would be I didn't know, but because it is used in this way with  나밖에, it is not.

"이기적인" or "eegiejeokin" means selfish.

"내가" or "naega" means I did, but in here, it means me.  

So, constructing it together, it would be: Always only me knew selfish me. 

That clearly does not make sense, so we need to convert it to English sentence structure.  Converting it (and fixing grammatical errors because the literal translation would not be grammatically correct) would bring us to the sentence: The selfish me, who always knew only myself.  Now, I know this sentence does not exactly sound sentence-like (is that a word?  Idek).  However, since this is a song, each line is not a sentence, and is written more stylistically.  

So in the end, what did we learn?

- Korean sentence structure is subject + object + verb

- All the terms listed in the sentence (이기적인, 내가, 늘, etc etc)

- Not all words/phrases mean the same exact thing in contexts