I think only direct democracy is a real democracy. No need for "direct", just "democracy" will do. The fact that so call democratic countries need a modifier before the word "democracy" tells you that it is not real, as such.

A representative democracy is really a practical alternative to a real democracy which would have been hard to implement. That doesn't make it real though. Its just the practical best one can do, probably. That abstraction layer of representatives, who get a free reign, gets in the way, rendering it no longer a real democracy.

It doesn't matter what you think, words aren't defined by personal opinion but by common usage. They are used to communicate, and what you want to call a real democracy everyone else calls a direct democracy. So if your intention is to communicate effectively, don't use your own definitions for words because you like it better because it'll just continually ensure you're misunderstood.

Direct democracies are not the only real democracies and it makes you look foolish and uneducated to insist it so.