It could be hard to understand sentences because of a complicated mix of grammatical techniques: descriptive phrases, independent and dependent clauses, conjunctions, even incorrect punctuation; and some sentences are just poorly written. Here is the EF English Live guide to helpful phrases and words to use when you’re not quite sure what someone is telling you… Formal These short phrases are polite ways to communicate that you didn’t hear or don’t understand something in the English language. * Now try and figure out the meaning of the words. 1 people chose this as the best definition of understand: To learn something indire... See the dictionary meaning, pronunciation, and sentence examples. To understand a word without a dictionary, try re-reading the entire sentence to see if the context helps you to find out what the word means. * Break down your paragraph into sentences and further into words. I really don't understand these sentences: Stack Exchange Network Stack Exchange network consists of 176 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow , the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. In English, we have simple sentences, compound sentences and complex sentences. The most important of all auxiliary verbs in a formula is the first one. Rewordify.com is powerful, free, online software that improves reading, learning, and teaching. Third, the translator must consult grammar, diction, and reference works to understand rare and unfamiliar words. These sentences are all easy to understand because they’re composed of very small trees that are completed quickly. The English language is incredibly confusing and undeniably complex. We don’t use just grammatical rules to break sentences in chunks. In some cases, you can hardly get their meanings even though you know every word in those sentences. If it's unclear, try to figure it out by thinking about the meaning of the words you're familiar with, since the unknown word might have a similar meaning. * Read the words as a part of the sentence. ... and one main verb (has a meaning to understand/translate). Secondly, the translator must study the text in order to understand the meaning. * You now have a sentence that make sense. All of them can be extended to long sentences and become a barrier for you to understand the whole article. II. To understand sentences in English. To better understand the use of English in different countries, Kachru conceived the idea of three concentric circles of the language. Anyone who has studied more than one language can attest that English is not the easiest to understand at times — and these strange sentences are proof that words can take on different meanings depending on simple things like commas, words with multiple meanings, and which word is emphasized.