How does Depuis work?

It affects the tense of the sentence. The constructions are different in French and English. In English, for example, we might say something like: 'I have been playing football for 5 years'. In French, we use the present tense to convey the same meaning: 'Je joue au foot depuis cinq ans'. If instead, you wanted to say 'I HAD been playing football for 5 years', you would use the imperfect tense. This would work as follows: 'Je JOUAIS au foot depuis cinq ans'. In other words, in French we use the imperfect tense to convey the English pluperfect tense when using depuis.We also use depuis to say we have been doing something 'since' a particular time. For example, we might say 'je joue au foot depuis 2005' (translated as 'I have been playing football since 2005).