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Originally Posted by aikilychee 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. " |
In addition,
With regards to for vs. since, when in doubt add in the phrase "a period of":
Use 'for' with a period of time, and use 'since' with a specific date/time:
for 6 years ("a period of" 6 years)
since Friday (a specific day)
for 12 months ("a period of" 12 months)
since last year (i.e. 2003, a specific year)
for an hour ("a period of" an hour)
since 2:00 (a specific time)
EX: They've been studying Japanese for 2 years (a period of two years).
EX: They've been studying Japanese since 2002 (a specific year)
2) With regards to your Google finding, the writer omitted a few words:
...will more than double from (the rate it was at) a year ago.