FOR & SINCE

Many students ask me how to use 'For' and 'Since'.

So, I thought I would give you a few examples. Let me
begin with the first major point of advice:

For: We can use for any grammar tense

Since: We use with the Perfect tenses (Present
Perfect/Past Perfect etc)
The second piece of advice is that we use 'For' to talk
about a period of time. For example:
One week
Two months
Three years
Ten minutes
A long time
Half an hour
We use since to talk about a date or a specific time.
For example:
Yesterday
Last week
Thursday October 31st
1789
4/1/1980
To explain all this, I have put in a few photos to show
how it works. We are going to use the Past Simple and
Present Perfect as examples:
PRESENT PERFECT
This is a picture of me in Nice. I can describe my
life in Nice in two ways:
1.I have lived in Nice sinceFebruary 2011 (I have
given aspecific date)
2.I have lived in Nice for two and a half years (I
have given aperiod of time)
For this one I can use both 'for' and 'since' because
it is with the Present Perfect.

PAST SIMPLE
This one is slightly different. Again, I have used a
picture to explain it:

This picture is taken in China. I lived in China in the

past, but not now. So, I am going to use the Past
Simple. Here is the sentence:
I lived in China for four years (I can only use this
one because it is the Past Simple)
The idea is the same whenever we use the Past
Simple and not the Perfect tense. Here is another
example:

I lived in Oman for 6 months

I hope that is a useful explanation of the grammar.