Can anyone here comment on this?

Someone's just told me that this sentence is shown as correct on Duolingo:

Tá iasc agam agus ithim é (translated as "I have a fish and I eat it")

That looks to me as if someone had translated an ungrammatical ENGLISH sentence into Irish. Normally, in English, you'd say "I have a fish and I'm eating it," which in Irish would be "Tá iasc agam agus tá mé á ithe." I can't think of any circumstance in English under which you'd say "I have a fish and I eat it."

Am I going crazy here, or are both those sentences at Duolingo just plain wrong? And if so, can anything be done to change them? I'm not sure how Duolingo works...is it one of those consensus-based programs?

Redwolf

I'd say you are right. I can only think of few circumstances where the sentence is sensible in English, such as Italian-American English:
"So, right, I have the fish and I eat it and he says...."

A few English dialects use the present as a way of strongly visualising the past.

In Irish however, it doesn't really make sense as "Ithim" is habitual, so it should be "Bíonn" rather than "Tá" to match, i.e.

Bíonn iasc agam agus ithim é

in Hiberno-English:

I do have a fish and I do eat it.

_________________
The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

That was my impression as well. I've been trying to think under what circumstances anyone would phrase it this way, and could only come up with things like the examples you mention, which would seem like odd circumstances for a language course!

The only other thing I could come up with was maybe an answer to someone who over-anxiously asks "Do you have a fish? Do you even EAT fish?" But even then, a more natural answer (in the affirmative) would be something like "tá iasc agam, agus ithim, cinnte" (but not "ithim é"). And even that seems like a rather oddly specific situation!

Redwolf

There's a lot of examples in Irish that seem straight translated from English to Irish, without regards for correctness.

Some favorites:

Radió (misspelling)
Labhraigh do shinsir as Gaeilge
Chuaigh muid siar gach deireadh seachtaine...

Redwolf, are you saying I can't have my fish and eat it (too)?

AGOA!

This is absolutely par for the course with DuoLingo in all languages.

You get nonsense like "he eats a fish" all through it, when you can't habitually eat one particular fish. It's very confusing to the learner, and it's baffling to me as both a linguist and a computer programmer how they could let it happen.

_________________
A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

I agree I see the same thing in other languages (I did a lot of the Irish and Spanish courses). It seems silly to me to teach sentences like "The spider eats bread" and "The shadow sells drugs" where any grammar or spelling issues aside the concept itself doesn't make sense. Seems like its adding more trouble to the learning process because it doesn't let you use context clues as easily.

I don't know if it's any consolation to you, but I have a similar problem here - language teaching materials that supposed to be for teaching English are pretty awful (and I'm trying to stay polite) as is more often than not the level of spoken English you get from French teachers of English.
- mi tie-lore iz reesh

The impression I get from this sentence is that whoever wrote/contributed it is not an English speaker (or at least not a native English speaker) and has a native language that doesn't distinguish between habitual and progressive verb forms. If the English were correct, but the Irish incorrect, I'd assume it was a learner's mistake (and it is an easy one to make...I did it myself before I whacked my head with a grammar book often enough to remember the rule!), but I can't quite imagine a native (or fluent non-native) English speaker saying "I have a fish and I eat it."

I'm going on the assumption here that Duolingo is based on contributions from participants. If it's a computer-generated program, they have an entirely different set of problems!

It's bothersome that it's in a learning program, though. Also the person who told me about it said that, while there was quite a bit of discussion about that sentence, no one at any time indicated that it was incorrect.

Redwolf