This is more likely a cultural thing rather than language thing. Your sentence structure and vocabulary are completely fine, you are just missing the nuances of how to navigate the conversation.

It's like the difference between an argument and a debate. If you are entering a conversation to change someone's mind but willing to let yours change too, that's a debate/discussion. If you are entering a conversation only to change others minds, that's an argument. It definitely looked like you were just trying argue, but obviously that wasn't the case as you just didn't have all the information and tools yet.