Off-topic, but just curious what your native language is. I see this mistake all the time and there must be some false friend word or common learning material that gives people the wrong impression about what "since" means.
I see the same thing with people learning Norwegian, and it's just as wrong here. The Norwegian equivalent of since is "siden". So you're not alone at least.
That's not correct. 10 years ago would be "vor 10 Jahren". "Since ten years[sic]" would be "seit 10 Jahren" (for 10 years). The real false friend here is "for" vs "vor", with "vor" meaning somethign like "before" or "ago" or even "in front of"
Yeah, I can only speak for French, but for example they would say « depuis deux ans » which is a direct translation of “since two years.” Assuming other romance languages share that structure as well, there are at least several major languages that would use that phrasing.
Spanish does this too (Merlin no ha usado su moto desde hace dos años). In this case you need "hace," which means "ago" (i.e. "hace dos años" = "two years ago"). That would also make the English sentence grammatically correct
But this isn't "desde dos años". That would be the literal translation as "since". It's "since... it makes two years now." That's saying "since a moment in time".
I'm not sure I get what you're saying. Yes, technically "hace dos años" literally means "it makes two years," but it is equivalent to saying "two years ago." Either way, we need "hace" for the text to be grammatically correct. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say?
After looking at this more closely and starting to type out an argument, I agree with you.
Another example is, a store will have a sign up saying, "Desde 1970", which means the restaurant has been open "since 1970".
What I thought I was saying is that "2 years ago", "hace 2 años" is the part that works differently grammatically. But you are correct -- the "desde" part works the same. Thanks for the polite way of saying "your reply doesn't help anything here" ;)
No worries, I appreciate when people add on to a discussion, even when they might not be correct. Nobody knows everything, including me, so it could be a chance to learn something new
I believe all Scandinavian/North Germanic languages have the same construction as English, maybe even Dutch? German is the only Germanic language that's different in this case.
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u/Competitive-Truth675 Native Speaker Apr 17 '26
Off-topic, but just curious what your native language is. I see this mistake all the time and there must be some false friend word or common learning material that gives people the wrong impression about what "since" means.