So looking at some examples,
私は日本に2005八月から、2006一月まですんで いる。
I'm just wondering, this form I suppose is better, the te-iru verb form, though I'm not sure why it's not a past tense form of iru. In my other sentence, I used suru, sunde-shimasu, which might be incorrect because it's a verb modifying another verb? Does it work only as noun-verb, like benkyou-shite?
Thanks again.
ed: corrected an obvious grammatical omission, but overall the sentence structure is the same.