make yourself understood

understand | American Dictionary

understand
verb
us/ˌʌn·dərˈstænd/past tense and past participleunderstoodus/ˌʌn·dərˈstʊd/

understandverb (KNOW)

to know the meaning of something, or to know how a person feels and why the person behaves in a particular way:
[ + question word ]I don’t understand what he means.
[ T ]Is there anyone here who understands English?
[ T ]It was so noisy I couldn’t understand (= recognize) a word he was saying.
[ I ]If you choose not to come, I’ll understand.
[ T ]He claimed that no one ever understood him (= had any sympathy for him or knew what he was feeling).
[ + question word ]I understand how she feels about the loss of her dog.
[ T ]It is understood that (= Everyone knows and accepts that) you don’t bring food or drinks into the library.

understandverb (BELIEVE)

[ T ]
to believe something is true because you have been told something that causes you to think it:
[ + (that) clause ]I understand (that) the show will go on, but with a different cast.
I understood him to say (= I believed that he said) that the trip had been canceled.

Examples of understand

understand
Not much influence because of lack of organization, understanding of issues, and means to participate and influence reforms.
Quality of life and social production functions : a framework for understanding health effects.
The first page of each category is a practice page to ensure that the subject understands the task.
After determining that classes of nicotine withdrawal exist, understanding the etiology of withdrawal can be enhanced by applying behavior genetic modeling to the latent classes.
Thus, institutional design emerges as a factor in understanding lobbying success.
To achieve this, governments must come to a clearer understanding the role of stakeholder input in governance strategies and of associated metagovernance issues.
The notion of sectoral specialisation is supported by another branch of recent analysis which involves understanding differences in the characteristics of firm owners.
Truncated power laws : a tool for understanding aggregation patterns of animals?
Studying capillary discharged plasma is helpful in understanding the principle of laser production and finding the best experimental parameters.
The first step in understanding the phenomenon is to name it.
Taste is a complex, modern phenomenon that can be understood in a number of ways.
Having already accomplished some of the work of understanding the sentence, the children would have more resources available on the second attempt.
Alternatively, understanding false belief may be enhanced, but more modestly.
In later development, language plays a crucial role in understanding the world, and in leading to change in culture-specific behavior.
Answering this involves stepping outside the discipline of the system designer and understanding the social, material and organisational aspects of medical work.
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These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.