[Gibbon1]

Friends of mine that are teachers say, if one student speaks up and says they don't get it. Then most of them aren't following either.

[marcus_holmes]

had this in Uni. I was the annoying student who asked questions all the time. After a few units, I had other students thank me for asking all those questions, because they also didn't understand but were too shy to ask.

[agustif]

Well the old adage of not caring of looking stupid or asking stupid questions.

If one is engaged in conversation, one should not restrain himself from asking whatever for politics/social issues.

Let the question be asked, it can be esaily dismissed or ignored if it's a bad/not useful question, but it can be asked too anyway!

[rubber_duck]

Like someone else said - this is entirely different from a team setting - when you have a team of say 5 people and a newcomer - the new guy interrupting the meeting for every thing he doesn't understand is just sucking the time out of 4 other people on the team.

Thinking that you get to ask for clarification whenever you feel like it just because you don't understand something is very self entitled - you have to consider the context first. If someone is explaining something to you directly or the purpose of the meeting is to teach something to the whole team by all means ask for clarification.