You can't understand the tao because there is nothing to "understand".
That is the whole point. If you walk in the woods on a beautiful day and hear birds chirping, there is nothing to "understand". It isn't an intellectual exercise.
Quibbling about translations of the Tao Te Ching is really quite comical. A better taoist "teaching" would be to throw your copy in the garbage and go for a walk in the woods. This is where the cultural problems come in though. That is not really what is meant by the English word "teaching". Then you are expecting to "learn" some kind of new symbolic representation when the whole point is to get rid of symbolic representation.
The idea you can't understand concepts from other humans because you were born into a different cultures is really stupid.