Well, I would not say that you failed :)
However, doing iconography is REALLY HARD.. as in EXTREMELY hard. When doing UI, the general rule is that you should never just have an icon without a lable, and if you choose to have an icon without a label you have to lean heavily on conventions within the genere you are dealing with, or spend a lot of time on really understanding and getting under the skin of your user.
NNGroup have a really nice article and a short video on this, which I would recommend.
https://www.nngroup.com/videos/icon-text-labels/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/icon-usability/
So, you had an idea of a clean interface without having to think about text and translations etc.
You suceeded, because I figured it out in the end.. but I had to fail a few times, and you would like to avoid that.. so failing a bit without consequences first could be the solution to the problem here :)