Vocab Unlocked from 懂: 听得懂 - 听不懂

I hear you and trust that I will learn the difference between words and ideas in English and Chinese when I have more context! Electronic context is useful, but it's a one-way monologue. Social distancing and travel limits still have me hearing nearly zero real-time Mandarin Chinese and having nearly zero opportunities to interact and test my hypotheses about what word goes where when people are truly trying to understand each other.

So, I did go on a search to find the difference between 懂 dǒng and 明白 míngbái.

Here's an excerpt from an essay I found by Chia-Chia Lin in The Paris Review:

In Mandarin Chinese, the commonly used terms dong (懂), mingbai (明白), liaojie (了解), and lijie (理解) can all be translated to the English “understand,” though which term you use is related to tone, context, familiarity, and abstractness. The breakdown of the terms can be illuminating. For example, mingbai is composed of the words ming, “bright” or “clear,” and bai, “white,” and conjures a sense of clarity. The written character for dong contains the radical, or written component, that means “heart”—often found in words that deal with feelings and thoughts. Lijie and liaojie both contain the word jie, “untie.” And the written character for jie (解) unfolds further. If you start at the upper right and work clockwise, you can identify the pictographs 刀 (knife), 牛 (ox), and 角 (horn); the word is said to have originated from “cut off the ox’s horn”—to dissect or open up.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/07/one-word-understand/

Thanks to MB members, I used this link:

https://hanzisearch.netlify.app/

to find that 解 jiě is covered in Level 29. I looked ahead and see 了解 liǎojiě is mentioned here:

D:\Courses\Mandarin Blueprint\Course/phase-4-graded-reading-levels-21-30/categories/3636031/posts/12972073.html

Online, I found lots of other efforts to explain the differences, none very clear 明 or helpful.

懂
明白
了解
理解

Care to explain the difference? Or does knowing the difference between them matter much?

Thanks for considering!