A lot of people when talking to me will stop after a few sentences and say ‘do you understand?’ and some before starting a sentence will say ‘do you hear me?’ At first I thought that it was because I was a foreigner or because I had a funny look on my face when they were talking to me, but after a while of listening to other conversations I realized that it very common in conversations.
For a while I thought it was very strange, I didn’t understand why they would say those things. We don’t do that in the US… or do we?
After doing some thinking, I think we do things similarly but possibly with a larger variety of phrases. My host father will say, ‘Do you hear?’ or ‘Did you hear me?’ when he wants to talk to me (or anyone really) when I am not looking at him (because he knows that if I am not looking directly at someone, I am not usually paying attention and/or he wants to get my attention) which seems kinda rude, but it is no more rude that when in the US we get someone’s attention by saying: Sir, the person’s name, hey, tapping someone on the arm, etc.
And when someone asks, ‘Do you understand?’ or ‘Did you understand?’ they aren’t being rude either. It is like when we in the US say: Got it? Right? See what I mean? Feel me? Etc.
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