Understanding vs. Experience — What's the Difference?
Difference Between Understanding and Experience
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Compare with Definitions
Understanding
Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to use concepts to model that object. Understanding is a relation between the knower and an object of understanding.
Experience
Experience is the process through which conscious organisms perceive the world around them. Experiences can be accompanied by active awareness on the part of the person having the experience, although they need not be.
Understanding
The ability by which one understands; intelligence
Concepts that are beyond the understanding of a child.
Experience
The apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind
A child's first experience of snow.
Understanding
The quality or condition of one who understands; comprehension
Do you have much understanding of calculus?.
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Experience
Active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill
A lesson taught by experience.
A carpenter with experience in roof repair.
Understanding
Individual or specified judgment or outlook; opinion
In my understanding, this is a good plan.
Experience
The knowledge or skill so derived.
Understanding
A usually implicit agreement between two or more people or groups
An understanding between neighbors over late-night noise.
Experience
An event or a series of events participated in or lived through.
Understanding
A disposition to appreciate or share the feelings and thoughts of others; sympathy
Can't you show some understanding for the poor child?.
Experience
The totality of such events in the past of an individual or group.
Understanding
Characterized by or having good sense or compassion
An understanding teacher.
Experience
To participate in personally; undergo
Experience a great adventure.
Experienced loneliness.
Understanding
The act of one that understands or comprehends; comprehension; knowledge; discernment.
Experience
The effect upon the judgment or feelings produced by any event, whether witnessed or participated in; personal and direct impressions as contrasted with description or fancies; personal acquaintance; actual enjoyment or suffering.
It was an experience he would not soon forget.
Understanding
(countable) Reason or intelligence, ability to grasp the full meaning of knowledge, ability to infer.
Experience
(countable) An activity one has performed.
Understanding
(countable) Opinion, judgement or outlook.
According to my understanding, the situation is quite perilous. I wonder if you see it this way, too.
Experience
(countable) A collection of events and/or activities from which an individual or group may gather knowledge, opinions, and skills.
Understanding
(countable) An agreement of minds; harmony; something mutually understood or agreed upon.
Experience
(uncountable) The knowledge thus gathered.
Understanding
An informal contract; mutual agreement.
I thought we had an understanding - you do the dishes, and I throw the trash.
Experience
Trial; a test or experiment.
Understanding
A reconciliation of differences.
The parties of the negotiation have managed to come to an understanding.
Experience
(transitive) To observe certain events; undergo a certain feeling or process; or perform certain actions that may alter one or contribute to one's knowledge, opinions, or skills.
Understanding
(uncountable) Sympathy.
He showed much understanding for my problems when he heard about my past.
Experience
Trial, as a test or experiment.
She caused him to make experienceUpon wild beasts.
Understanding
Showing compassion, tolerance, and forbearance.
Experience
The effect upon the judgment or feelings produced by any event, whether witnessed or participated in; personal and direct impressions as contrasted with description or fancies; personal acquaintance; actual enjoyment or suffering.
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.
To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.
When the consuls . . . came in . . . they knew soon by experience how slenderly guarded against danger the majesty of rulers is where force is wanting.
Those that undertook the religion of our Savior upon his preaching, had no experience of it.
Understanding
(dated) Knowing; skilful.
Experience
An act of knowledge, one or more, by which single facts or general truths are ascertained; experimental or inductive knowledge; hence, implying skill, facility, or practical wisdom gained by personal knowledge, feeling or action; as, a king without experience of war.
Whence hath the mind all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from experience.
Experience may be acquired in two ways; either, first by noticing facts without any attempt to influence the frequency of their occurrence or to vary the circumstances under which they occur; this is observation; or, secondly, by putting in action causes or agents over which we have control, and purposely varying their combinations, and noticing what effects take place; this is experiment.
Understanding
Present participle of understand
Experience
To make practical acquaintance with; to try personally; to prove by use or trial; to have trial of; to have the lot or fortune of; to have befall one; to be affected by; to feel; as, to experience pain or pleasure; to experience poverty; to experience a change of views.
The partial failure and disappointment which he had experienced in India.
Understanding
Knowing; intelligent; skillful; as, he is an understanding man.
Experience
To exercise; to train by practice.
The youthful sailors thus with early careTheir arms experience, and for sea prepare.
Understanding
The act of one who understands a thing, in any sense of the verb; knowledge; discernment; comprehension; interpretation; explanation.
Experience
The accumulation of knowledge or skill that results from direct participation in events or activities;
A man of experience
Experience is the best teacher
Understanding
An agreement of opinion or feeling; adjustment of differences; harmony; anything mutually understood or agreed upon; as, to come to an understanding with another.
He hoped the loyalty of his subjects would concur with him in the preserving of a good understanding between him and his people.
Experience
The content of direct observation or participation in an event;
He had a religious experience
He recalled the experience vividly
Understanding
The power to understand; the intellectual faculty; the intelligence; the rational powers collectively conceived an designated; the higher capacities of the intellect; the power to distinguish truth from falsehood, and to adapt means to ends.
But there is a spirit in man; and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.
The power of perception is that which we call the understanding. Perception, which we make the act of the understanding, is of three sorts: 1. The perception of ideas in our mind; 2. The perception of the signification of signs; 3. The perception of the connection or repugnancy, agreement or disagreement, that there is between any of our ideas. All these are attributed to the understanding, or perceptive power, though it be the two latter only that use allows us to say we understand.
In its wider acceptation, understanding is the entire power of perceiving an conceiving, exclusive of the sensibility: the power of dealing with the impressions of sense, and composing them into wholes, according to a law of unity; and in its most comprehensive meaning it includes even simple apprehension.
Experience
An event as apprehended;
A surprising experience
That painful experience certainly got our attention
Understanding
Specifically, the discursive faculty; the faculty of knowing by the medium or use of general conceptions or relations. In this sense it is contrasted with, and distinguished from, the reason.
I use the term understanding, not for the noetic faculty, intellect proper, or place of principles, but for the dianoetic or discursive faculty in its widest signification, for the faculty of relations or comparisons; and thus in the meaning in which "verstand" is now employed by the Germans.
Experience
Go or live through;
We had many trials to go through
He saw action in Viet Nam
Understanding
The cognitive condition of someone who understands;
He has virtually no understanding of social cause and effect
Experience
Have firsthand knowledge of states, situations, emotions, or sensations;
I know the feeling!
Have you ever known hunger?
I have lived a kind of hell when I was a drug addict
The holocaust survivors have lived a nightmare
I lived through two divorces
Understanding
The statement (oral or written) of an exchange of promises;
They had an agreement that they would not interfere in each other's business
There was an understanding between management and the workers
Experience
Of mental or physical states or experiences;
Get an idea
Experience vertigo
Get nauseous
Undergo a strange sensation
The chemical undergoes a sudden change
The fluid undergoes shear
Receive injuries
Have a feeling
Understanding
An inclination to support or be loyal to or to agree with an opinion;
His sympathies were always with the underdog
I knew I could count on his understanding
Experience
Undergo an emotional sensation;
She felt resentful
He felt regret
Understanding
The capacity for rational thought or inference or discrimination;
We are told that man is endowed with reason and capable of distinguishing good from evil
Experience
Undergo;
The stocks had a fast run-up
Understanding
Characterized by understanding based on comprehension and discernment and empathy;
An understanding friend
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