Your indirectly talking about the year. "January" is for the current year and "last January" would be last year.
I would interpret "this past" as most recent thing from the current. So "this past January" would, to me, sound like the most recent January (Jan 2017)
They could mean the same thing depending on the speaker.
"I saw that film last January."
"I saw that film in January."
As the other commenters have mentioned, "last January" may mean January 2016 for them, whereas for others it's 2017. The second example should be a definite 2017, except you always have your occasional smart alec [0].
I would disagree with jasonkester--there is ambiguity here.
Unrelated to the content, but is this proper English:
> when the tech giant acquired Activision Blizzard later next year
As a non-native speaker, I am confused about the use of past tense for an (alleged) future event ("next year"). Is it just a typo and it should say "last year"? Or is it business English meaning "will have acquired"?
I'm not sure where the problem is, where I'm using past tense it's for events that happened in the past. The system can be current but have been launched in the past.
Ehm...why all the past tense? We still ARE very much around...we just had our best year yet [1], and are on track to do even better. Don't count us out just yet! :)
I would interpret "this past" as most recent thing from the current. So "this past January" would, to me, sound like the most recent January (Jan 2017)
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