Common Mistakes: For / During / Since

When we want to talk about how long something has lasted, we have two options, “for” for the duration of time (I’ve lived here for 10 years) and “since” for points in time when something started (I’ve lived here since 2005).

In the first example, many Spanish speakers like to use “during”, because ‘durante’ is the word Spanish uses.  However, in English, “during” is not a very commonly-used word.

Its only real use is to describe an action that occurred inside a larger period of time and it is followed by a noun:

I read several novels during my holiday.
I drove 500,000 miles during my time at the company.

One other common mistake from Spanish speakers:

I have worked here since ten years ago.

“since…ago” is not grammatically correct in English; use “for”:

I’ve worked here for ten years.