I am assuming that you mean 알았어 and that means “I knew”, “I know”, “I understand”, etc. It is the past tense of 알아. When you use it in a sentence it is best translated as “knew”. An example would be “나는 날씨에대 해 알았어 (I knew about the weather)”. However, it is also used alone to express that you have understood what was just said to you. Like if your friend was giving you directions, your mom was reminding of something, or a person was giving you a task to do your response could be 알았어. In this scenario the better translations would be along the lines of “I know”, “I understand”, “understood”, or “got it”. In English we can flip the verb tense between past and present but in Korean it is always past because you had to understand what was being said in the past, even if the past was five seconds ago. I hope this helps:)