- Forum >
- Topic: Norwegian (Bokmål) >
- "Jeg forstår ikke hva det bet…
17 Comments
i think you can. there was some misunderstanding yesterday with your friend and he said some ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤, and then today you are telling the story to someone. of course it is not the common way to use these two verbs in a sentence, but there are certain cases. might sound strange, but it definitely is not wrong or incorrect.
Unfortunately, the Dunning-Kruger effect makes too many people assume that a sentence for which they can't readily imagine a real-world scenario must be a grammatical error. I've seen this more on the Norwegian course than elsewhere, because this course tries to use interesting sentences with elements like "his boyfriend" that challenge some people's assumptions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense#English: English has only two morphological tenses: the present, as in he goes, and the past, as in he went. The present tense sometimes references the future (as in the bus leaves tomorrow), and thus may also be called the non-past (or present–future) tense. (It also sometimes references the past, however, in what is called the historical present.) --- So, past goes with past, non-past with non-past, period.
This is the problem. You think that the sentence describes past events, and that the need for past tenses is therefore an open-and-shut case, and anyone saying otherwise must be thinking that "I don't understand" can refer to the past. You are failing to grasp that it's in the present tense because it refers to the present moment, and that all of your assumptions are mistaken.
You're also a non-native speaker telling a native speaker of standard English, with a degree in Modern Languages, and two decades of experience as a language teacher, translator and interpreter, that she is messing up the grammar of a simple everyday sentence that virtually every English-speaker says in the same way.