Spanish · Chapter 23 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Hace and desde
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
Still going means the present tense
English reaches for a perfect to say how long something has gone on. Spanish stays stubbornly in the present, because the situation has not stopped. Hace dos años que vivo aquí means I have lived here for two years, and vivo is the verb you want, not he vivido. Drill that tense mismatch first.
Hace dos años que vivo aquí.
Desde takes a point, desde hace takes a stretch
Look at what follows the word. A point in time, a date, a day, a clock time, takes plain desde: vivo aquí desde 2020, trabajo aquí desde el lunes. A length of time takes desde hace: vivo aquí desde hace dos años. Desde dos años and desde hace 2020 are both wrong.
Vivo aquí desde 2020.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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24-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.
Lesson 3 of 7 in this chapter