It's been a long time...

I've been feeling a little homesick lately, so I thought we'd take a look at one of those English structures that's so different from Spanish that it always seems to throw Spanish speaks into confusion:

It's (been) a long time since
+
past simple/present perfect.

For example:

It's (been) a long time since I went/I've been home. (I last went home in December 2005!)

The Spanish translation would be:

Hace mucho que no voy a mi país. (or something similar)

The confusion lies in two things:

• In English, to express the idea of a period of time which began in the past and continues until the present, we use the present perfect, whereas Spanish uses the present.
• In addition, in English we don't use a negative, as the idea of not doing something is implicit in the construction: If the last time you did it was x time ago, you haven't done it in the entire intervening period.

Incidentally, "It's (been) a long time since" has several variations to express really long period of time, or for emphasis: It's (been) ages / forever / eons / yonks [very colloquial] since ...

You can also use "a while" instead of "a long time", or a specific period, such as "five years", "a weeks", "a few months", etc.