The phrase "a primitive understanding of" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a basic or simplistic grasp of a concept or subject matter.
Example: "His explanation revealed a primitive understanding of the complex theories involved in the project."
Alternatives: "a rudimentary grasp of" or "a basic comprehension of".
We were at the age when a primitive understanding of language is intersected by a kind of giddiness about its possibilities.
These statistics, while easy to grasp, give only a primitive understanding of how much the players actually helped the Yankees win games.
Labour has conceded for the first time that a "primitive understanding" of the Islamic world caused some of the problems faced by the west in Iraq and Afghanistan, and warned David Cameron his response to the terrorist crisis in north Africa shows he has not learned the painful lessons from those conflicts.
Although significant progress has been made in achieving hematopoietic differentiation from both murine and human ESCs, we have only a primitive understanding of the underlying mechanisms that specify hematopoietic cell fate, and a very limited capacity to direct the differentiation of the definitive HSC that would be suitable for clinical engraftment studies.
If, as some have suggested, quantum phenomena govern the brain, evidence for the fact is not likely to be found in scrutiny of lobes or glands or by means of any primitive understanding of the brain's materiality.
It's a revelation which shows just how detached from reality Iain Duncan Smith's reforms are and what a primitive understanding he has of the people they really affect.
The studies on young learners' awareness of variation have indicated the presence of a primitive understanding that needs to be integrated, revisited and emphasised in statistics learning from the earliest grade levels (Garfield and Ben-Zvi, 2007; Lehrer and Kim, 2009; Lehrer et al., 2011; Watson and Kelly, 2002a, 2002b).
These men were anti-Stalinist Marxists in love with modernism, and bent on defying the CP's primitive understanding of literature as a tool of polemics; they loved Trotsky because he had said that art could best aid the revolution by being true to itself rather than to political correctness, by which was meant the social realism that dominated the fiction of the 1930s.
"An almost primitive understanding of the Afghan population, culture and geography prior to Nato's intervention severely undermined international attempts to work with proxies, and our political strategy was in its conception insufficiently representative".
Not only is Grisham unable to make us care about his characters, but he also seems unaware of what this case says about the systemic flaws that continue to vitiate the American criminal justice system, in particular an absurd reliance on polygraphs and a primitive drug-based understanding of mental illness.
We go to and fro our affairs, baking cookies and digging up Sarah Palin bikini pictures, unaware of just how massively primitive our understanding of life and existence really is.
