I find it far more effective to switch my 'language' to the language of the receiver as a sender.
If a message is sent it should take the audience into account. Expecting the audience to adapt to the sender is backwards, and often not even possible.
I think this is a non-tech application of Postel's Law (which I actually vehemently disagree with in tech circles, but whatever): as a sender, try to adapt your language to that of the receiver; as a receiver try to accept what the sender is saying and convert it to your language.
Really, then end goal from your personal perspective should be to understand and be understood. If the person on the other side of the argument isn't very good at adapting, you may want to choose to adapt, regardless of whether you are the speaker or listener.
When compensating (in real life) for a language mismatch, there's no tool that can beat empathy. Try and think yourself in their shoes, and try to understand where they're going with their words, motions, etc.
We should teach kids more about this. It's a vastly underrated skill. Instead, we teach them to attach negative feelings to words. Which is the opposite.
When I say I feel like a fucking sandwich, it's not used as a swear word but as a modern equivalent of "verily". If you had used empathy, you'd understood. Instead, you choose to go by your own set of interpretations, which means you take it to say something heinous.
It's one of the things that set us apart from machines. We have the capacity to choose to interpret stuff however we want.
> When compensating (in real life) for a language mismatch, there's no tool that can beat empathy. Try and think yourself in their shoes, and try to understand where they're going with their words, motions, etc.
When I think myself in other people's shoes, I rather tend to refuse the points the other person makes much more (up to hate for the other side).
Why this? The reason is that if I try to empathize, I immediately see and feel why (if you consider the values and feelings the other person has as mathematical axioms) the argument/actions the other person does makes no logical sense. The problem is that most people behave very stupidly (in sense of applying logic with respect to their values). The only thing that I can do in this situation is being brutally honest about the logical fallacy that I have detected. The sooner the other side realizes this, the better.
Empathy is highly related with the big 5 personality trait Agreeableness, but is not itself agreement.
It is not a failure of empathy to come to understand someone's perspective, and then disagree with that perspective (regardless of what internet busybodies want you to believe).
Depending on how high in Conscientiousness (another big 5 trait) someone is, they might have action-oriented or planning-based conclusions after empathizing with someone. It might seem cold, calculating and "not empathizing" to someone higher in agreeableness.
Both sides should make an effort to understand the other person's language and point of view. The speaker doesn't always know the other person and their biases and what pisses them off.
If I'm talking to someone 1:1 and they don't put in the effort to understand what your real point is, it's not worth continuing the conversation.
If a message is sent it should take the audience into account. Expecting the audience to adapt to the sender is backwards, and often not even possible.