Hi, this is I think a rather subtle question. So, I'm in the awkward stage of learning a language where I understand most everything which is spoken in an everyday register and if things get more formal or specialized I can at least get the basic gist, I rarely run into the problem of not being able to pick up on the context. So, I don't often have to wonder just what on Earth people are trying to tell me.
However, even though the semantic content is often clear to me, the semantic context on the other hand can sometimes be unclear. I come from a totally different cultural world with different expectations and customs, so sometimes I simply don't understand why people say certain things. I notice when native speakers directly ask "什麼意思?" it is in these types of situations where more information is needed to make sense of what somebody just said. However, because I telegraph that my proficiency level is not very high by the way I speak and to a lesser extent by my appearance, when I ask people this their first instinct is usually to translate key information into English. Which is a little patronizing and also unhelpful in this case. I understand why in these situations they think I don't understand the meaning of what they said, as opposed to not understanding what the point they are trying to make is. Also, they probably don't expect there to be any reasonable way to confuse the meaning if one indeed understood the utterance itself, so I don't blame them. What I want to know, is there a more subtle way to ask the same thing without having to outright prove to them that I understood what they said by repeating information back to them?
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