Describe a span of time of 1 or 2 years, without being too literal


I'm looking for a word like "sometime ago", "a while ago", that is good for
describing a 1-2 years span of time.

I feel like **しばらく前** is for shorter spans of time, and **昔** is for longer
ones. Is there something in the middle I could use here?

I wanna say something like:

> I worked for that company sometime ago

Without being literal about how much time it has been since I've worked there

> しばらく前、その会社で働きました。




以前{いぜん} might be what you're looking for. From
[デジタル大辞泉](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/jn/11804/meaning/m0u/)

> ２ 今より前の時点。現在から見て近い過去。副詞的にも用いる。「―と違って今では」「―会ったことがある」

Note that some other dictionaries like
[大辞林](https://www.weblio.jp/content/%E4%BB%A5%E5%89%8D) and 明鏡 think the
referred to time is relatively far in the past: 今よりもだいぶ前 for the former and
現在より（かなり）前 for the latter. But I think this word fulfills your requirement for
the vagueness of the time pretty well.

Using your example you might say:

> 以前、その会社で働いていました

I think it'd be fairly close to something like `I used to work for that
company` in English.




So in my experience, if we want to describe a couple years without being
specific, we would use the following:

> 何年か｛なんねんか｝

This seems to be what you are trying to describe, and I am sure that there are
other ways to do it, but keeping it simple in this case is probably for the
best.

Using the example phrase you provided, I would say the following:

> 何年か前、その会社で働いていました。

**EDIT:** On further though of this answer, I thought that I should make some
additional appendages.

`何年か` is not specific to the number of years, but it is typically implied to
be more than 1, maybe 2 years, as the translation could reasonably be `a few
years ago`.

If you're looking for something more specific, you could say `1，2年前`, but that
is probably more specific than what you are looking for.

If you're specifically trying to be non specific about when it was that you
worked there, you can also just say: `前、その会社...`

As has been stated in the other answer, 以前 can also work.

