channukiah-in-a-box:

If I don’t understand what you’re saying, or don’t hear it, it isn’t necessarily because I don’t care, or even because I wasn’t listening.

Sometimes I zone out, not because I’m uninterested but because it can be very challenging for me to maintain focus, especially in conversation.

Sometimes I might not hear you or be able to parse what you are saying, no matter how hard I try. I may ask you to repeat yourself, but after years of asking people to repeat themselves and giving up after two or three tries, I sometimes don’t even try once. If I couldn’t parse it the first time, its sometimes best to cut my losses and move on, rather then getting stuck on one phrase. Maybe it will make sense eventually.

Sometimes I will hear and understand every word you say, but not be able to understand it as a whole. It’s like you’re speaking another language that I have studied a little but am far from fluent in: I know a number of words in German, but if someone came up to me and started speaking fluent German, it would go straight over my head, even if they only used words I knew. Here, too, I am unlikely to get it on the second pass—I’ll be concentrating too hard on trying to take in the words to actually understand the sentence.