I tried formatting the card before already, and still no luck. what do I do? only 4gb of space was open on the internal storage, so I can barely do anything without transferring some apps over.
Welcome to Android Central! Moved from the RAM forum to the Alcatel forum.
Not all devices support the ability to move apps to SD. Your phone is very much an entry-level phone, and with 4 GB of internal storage, probably only about 1 GB is actually usable by you, since the rest is taken up by the system. Unfortunately, you can't do much with these phones besides make calls, browse the web, and have a few relatively small apps installed. Even if you could move apps to SD, you could only move a portion of each app, not the whole thing.