Nominalization with "to be"

I’m pretty late to the party, but

I’m 99% sure it’s the copula’sて form, specifically turning it into the ~ている construction (is that called the present continuous in English? I’m not sure).

And that’s also the same construction in your other example

I cannot find the original question on HiNative, but I feel that the person correcting the sentence should have provided a more natural way to say that if it’s problematic.
Googling around, I did find examples of use of でいる as well, but those were kinda specific, e.g. the title of this book:

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Isn’t で also the te-form of the copula? So でいる would be the progressive form (can’t remember the exact term of what ている is called) of the copula? I could be wrong here but that’s what I thought when I saw it.

Edit: whoops I didn’t read the remaining comments, you guys already discussed this.

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At first, 学生でいる seemed funny to me too. But then I googled ”学生でいる” and read a bunch of examples. Now that I see the frequency and variety of use, it seems totally reasonable.

学生でいる今のうちに
学生でいるのもあと1年となりました
学生でいる間
学生でいるにはどうしたらいいのでしょうか
学生でいる期間くらいは好きなことをしたいという印象がある

This was the only English post I read with its simple explanation:

I was … pretty sure I’d heard this phrase, though the ~の生活が好き/~でよかった etc. examples above definitely struck me as being more natural for this context.

I think it might a case where it does have perfectly normal, native uses, but there just aren’t too many situations where you need to intellectualize the “being” in that way. In your examples, it’s exclusively to clarify temporal situations. “While I’m a student,” “as a (for the time being) student,” “my last year of being a student,” etc., as a matter of setting up context. When life as a student itself is the focus, "でいる” is probably a little stuffy/strange, since it’s unnecessarily verbose.

So, I guess I’d caution that … those are pretty much all the same use.

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I saw でいる a few times when reading recently, but I can’t remember what the phrases were. :confounded:

They were probably more in line with @Leebo’s 幸せでいてほしい example than 学生でいる though.

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I feel like the overall message here is that, yes, it does show up, because it’s the grammatical way to express that, but that when you’re just talking casually about your own living situation, there are more natural phrases.

There are a lot of cases in Japanese where a nomalized verb feels unnecessary compared to just using nouns, which kind of makes sense when you think about the amount of grammatical work going on. (But sometimes with simple verbs the nominalization is simpler too–like 読むの is definitely less stuffy than 読書. But, like … usually. Mostly. Sometimes.)

Now I’m going to be looking hawkishly for でいる constructions while reading and playing games though.

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Personally, I would go with 学生生活が好きだ.

It’s easier to say things that people are used to hearing than try to translate your English thoughts literally and maybe end up with an unnatural structure.

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