A good and polite way to ask "How long have you been playing drums?" How to correctly ask "how long have you been playing drums?" in a forum? I tried to come up with my own question but I don't know if it is grammatically correct and/or polite. Here is what I came up with > Could you please help me with this?

You are on the right track, but as someone has commented your conjugations need some work.

However, I'll give you what I would suggest is a natural way to ask this.





I think you could replace with simply , but I think the above is more clear.

Besides your issues with and , you don't need to use . Often in Japanese it's best not to use any word for "you", as it is implied and each word that means "you" has its own nuance.

If you want to use this for other things, you can just put the action in the "pre-masu" form (i.e. ) followed by this phrase:





This would translate to "How long have you been ~?"

EDIT: Replaced with

EDIT: Added general pattern