"Jeg forstår ikke hva det betød."

Translation: I do not understand what it meant.

[Cececherry]

Norwegian next to me says; "no one uses betød, but betydde".

[alek_d]

That is an exaggeration. I get more than 70k hits on Google for "betød" on Norwegian websites. The dictionary lists both.

[SanctMinimalicen]

From what I can find, "betydde" resembles Nynorsk and "betød" resembles Danish. That's interesting.

[Stigjohan]

Additionally, the rule-of-thumb in Nynorsk is to avoid words with the affixes an-, be-, -het and -else. So instead of "betydde" you could use "tydde". Please excuse me if you are trying to concentrate on Bokmål and I'm confusing you :)

[SanctMinimalicen]

My goal ultimately is to do Nynorsk, so anything I can learn about it is much appreciated! :D

[MindaugasP15]

You can't say "I don't understand what it meant." as it's written here, in DuoLingo, one must say "I didn't understand what it meant." Please, correct it. Thanks.

[esthof]

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.

[OsoGegenHest]

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.

[MindaugasP15]

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.

[OsoGegenHest]

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.

[enwda]

I do not understand (now) what you meant when you wrote this. And tomorrow, I still won't understand what you meant.

And I'm not from the South or a foreigner.

[Petroxide]

I think that would be "Jeg forsto(d) ikke hva det betød". This sentence probably means that he is wondering about what was the meaning of the subject (that occured in the past) at this moment.

[alek_d]

You're right. "I didn't understand" is "Jeg forstod ikke", wheras "I don't understand" is "Jeg forstår ikke".

[TonarinoCaitlin]

I wrote so many times "Jeg forstår ikke hva de betød." Is there a difference between what "de" and "det" sounds like? Could you even say that?

[Petroxide]

I have no idea how you can mix those two sounds but i will try to explain it. "de" sounds like the beginning of the english word "deed" and "det" sounds like the beginning of the english word "dead". I hope that helped ^^

[alek_d]

Right, "de" is pronounced with a "ee" sound and "det" with a "eh" sound.

[TonarinoCaitlin]

Ah, right. Actually, I don't know why I was mixing those up. You're right; they do sound completely different. Thanks for the help!