I am an English teacher for 10 years now?

English as a Second Language English Vocabulary, Grammar and Idioms
1

Hello everyone. What do you think of the use of the present simple in the following sentence:

I am an English teacher for about 10 years now and I am ready with a complete teaching style that would make you learn English in 2 weeks.

Wouldn’t it be better to say ‘I’ve been an English teacher for about 10 years now…’?

Many thanks,
Torsten[YSaerTTEW443543]

TOEIC listening, talks: Starting a biology lecture[YSaerTTEW443543]

2

Morning Torsten,

The present perfect seems the only possible tense here. The other possibility is to rejig the sentence as: I am an English teacher and have been for about ten years now …

Alan

3

Good morning Alan,

Thanks a lot for your quick response and your clear explanation. I came across that sentence on Myngle.com – a language learning community. Have you heard about that website?

Regards,
Torsten
PS: The verb rejig was new to me too, thanks for teaching it. Even my Babylon Translator does not have it![YSaerTTEW443543]

TOEIC listening, talks: Introducing a talk on the effects of vitamin D[YSaerTTEW443543]

4

I would take this structure (“I am…for/since” instead of “I have been…for/since”) as a first language indicator. Thus e.g.

  1. J’attends depuis longtemps

may be rendered by a French native speaker as

  1. I am waiting for a long time

instead of

  1. I have been waiting for a long time

(The same mistake, curiously, is sometimes made by English natives, when translating from languages which use the present instead of the present perfect in such cases.)

MrP