Oh, I agree with you there. I'm not saying it's used. I was just saying that it is a valid construction, at least in my grammar.

If it's not used, it's not English.

If there's no possible interpretable meaning, it's not English.

If your grammar accepts it, your grammar is superficial. Old structuralist schools of grammar that ignore semantics are by their nature incomplete, and the grammars used by linguists go into great depth with semantic categories etc.

Old-school structuralist grammars are generally OKish for language learners, as a lot of the semantic issues are self-evident -- I can't imagine an English learner generating this sentence because it is patent nonsense... assuming they have learnt the rules correctly.

But to putting this sort of oversimplified grammar into a computer that has no concept of "common sense".... well, that's just silly.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
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I'm fairly certain that Galaxyrocker is just stating that it passes his internal grammar's acceptability test. I personally see nothing grammatically wrong with it any more than the famous, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Madlibs works in exactly the same way and I've never heard anyone suggest that the sentences generated in Madlibs are grammatically incorrect regardless of how nonsensical. It just comes down to this: Do you want to learn another language via the Madlibs method or do you want to learn authentic speech?

The problem here, though, is that English speakers who are trying to learn Irish are getting confused. They're interpreting these sentence as meaning "I have a fish and I am eating it" (and "I eat it" IS often used, mistakenly, by English learners). If the sentence is meant to be progressive, the English is quite simply incorrect. If it's not meant to be progressive, it's just plain weird. But either way, it's luring Irish learners into making mistakes.

Redwolf

If you imagine the fish as a single cell on graph paper and a line moving forward representing time, then you can only eat that fish once but you can eat a category member of the set 'fish' again and again. I have a fish and I eat it would be like I have a coin and I spend it, and both would not work unless you had a dialect where its system of grammatical aspect had been altered or weakened.

Of course, if you could time travel...

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Oh so pleased to read your comments! I thought the Duolingo low spot was: we are turtles. Understood the phrase, found the words to double check, did not think it could possibly be correct and so did not fill it in - WRONG.

Is there a "perfect" course to follow?
Now hooked on Ros na Run, youtube clips even out of sequence are captivating.
Loving the threads on the Forum.

JulieA

Probably nothing perfect, but if I were to do it all over again, I'd consider doing one of Gaelchultúr's on-line courses built around "Gaeilge gan Stró"...and start saving my pennies for a Gaeltacht visit.

Like a lot of new learners, I was reluctant to put money into well-designed, structured, on-line classes when I started because I wasn't sure if I would enjoy studying the language enough to make it worth spending the money. Now here I am, almost 11 years later, having spent a great deal of money on books, computer programs, immersion weekends, and a couple of Gaeltacht stays, and that initial decision not to spend the money seems a bit silly in retrospect! There were on-line programs available back then through GaelTalk, and I remember talking myself out of them, saying "oh I'll just save the money and buy this book/CD/etc. instead." I think I'd have learned faster, and reached a good level of spoken Irish sooner, if I'd done something like that. Not that I haven't enjoyed the journey, but not spending the money at the time has proved to be a false economy.

Redwolf

I think that's an issue with all of Duolingo's courses and not just Irish. I don't care what method you like or philosophical school you might belong to the one thing that everyone can agree on is comprehensible input is required. And when you are at a basic level you should not be learning sentences where you are left asking yourself, "What does 'I am an ant' mean? Is this some sort of idomatic expression they have translated literally? 'I am an ant...' "

Look at the conversation around "O menino dá seu tigre" (The boy gives his tiger). This is just really dangerous here since in Portuguese the verb "dar" can have certain sexual connotations. The people who use Dulongo to learn a language spend more time trying to figure out what the f the intention of the sentence is than they actually spend learning the language. It's unfortunate because using the crowd sourced model they could actually rid their database of these abominations with very little effort on their part.

I've just had a look at their (or rather his) presentation of how he is learning French by this method on YouTube - c'est affreux - the pronunciation is awful, the sentences he's using are rubbish (I wouldn't say this in my sleep) - he's using the simple present when he should be using the equivalent of a present continuous, just as you would in Irish. To me it just looks and sounds like relentless marketing. I remember this kind of methodology being used twenty or thirty years ago - it's a kind of glorified parrot repetition.

I think a lot of this stems from the fact that Duolingo really doesn't seem to care about its userbase. They are notoriously bad for releasing stuff and updating them, only answering recently after several threads questioned them and their abilities. Despite promises of an update, even, they still haven't addressed the Irish audio issue, either. Furthermore, I don't think they care about what their course teaches; people are using it, so it's fine. Really, it just seems like they don't care, because they're still getting active users.