Thank you for your reply, Nah.
Actually I am proofreading an English workbook for junor high students, and I kept coming across this expression, like "They have been studying Japanese since 2 years ago". I corrected the first one without doubt, but then when more cropped up, I just couldn't help wondering if I myself had made a mistake. So I looked up the word "since" in the dictionary, and found the expression "since a long time ago", which made me more confused.
As to "from a year ago", I'd like to give one example from
http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/23/tech...stor/lamonica/ :(well, by googling

)
"Only two analysts follow the stocks but for what it's worth, they are predicting that third quarter revenues for
Netease.com will more than double from a year ago. "