Having utilised the chatroom yesterday, I was faced with the proposition of my limitation in the great tongue, of using calcified forms, rather than a mixture of sayings and generated material a native would use.

This suggests to me that too much practice in speech (or in this case typing) would be bad early on, possibly contributing to a fixing of ingrained bad habits.

Can any real fluent non-natives give of their experience here as to how, if it occurs, one got around the stage of badly learnt calques?

Gladly, if someone would please translate/explain "calques". ;-)

Béarlachas atá i gceist aige, nó nathanna ó theanga seachas an ghaeilge a chuir in iúl le focla gaeilge.

Examples of calques from a book on raising Irish-speaking children:

“Tá sé ag iarraidh tú.” in áit “Tá sé do d’iarraidh.”

“Sin mo. Sin do.” in áit “Is liomsa é. Is leatsa é.”

“Tá mé ag fáil fuar.” in áit “Tá mé ag éirí fuar.”

“An bhfuil cead agam briosca?” in áit “An bhfuil cead agam briosca a bheith agam?”

Of course, sometimes a calque becomes acceptable to some fluent speakers. Tá Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé sásta "Tá mé ag fáil fuar" a rá, mura bhfuil dul amú orm.

BRN: Ná bíodh imní ort! If you run a volume operation, you'll process a lot of Irish, and you'll make lots of mistakes. But the solid learning will outweigh the errors, and you'll only benefit from the practice in the long run. Just make sure you stay exposed to good models (in reading and listening) as you go.

N'fheadar an raibh Maidhc Dainín ag fáil fuacht seachas fuar (i. slaghdán)

"An bhfuil cead agam briosca a bheith agam?" -> maybe there is an Anglicism there as well. "To have lunch" in English, for example, but I don't think you would say lón a bheith agat in good Irish. Rud a bheith agat = to have sthg, to own sthg (possession). You don't own a lunch. I'd say "An bhfuil cead agam briosca a ithe?"

Is dóigh liom go bhfuil an ceart agat. Ní raibh mé sásta le "a beith agam" nuair a chóipeáil mé an sliocht sin.

quote:

Examples of calques from a book on raising Irish-speaking children:

“Tá sé ag iarraidh tú.” in áit “Tá sé do d’iarraidh.”

“Sin mo. Sin do.” in áit “Is liomsa é. Is leatsa é.”

“Tá mé ag fáil fuar.” in áit “Tá mé ag éirí fuar.”

“An bhfuil cead agam briosca?” in áit “An bhfuil cead agam briosca a bheith agam?”

I wouldn't consider the first one to be a calque, but rather a simple grammatical error. If you're used to saying things like:

ag ól bainne
ag lorg madra

, then it isn't too far-fetched to come out with:

ag iarraidh tú

I went some five years of learning Irish before I realised I had to say "do do chrá" instead of "ag crá thú".

The second one, too, I think is a little bogus. If anything, the calque would be more like:

Seo mo cheannsa, sin do cheannsa.

"ag fáil fuar" though is a perfect example in my opinion.

There's another thing, which I'll call the "psuedocalque" for the time being. A "psuedocalque" isn't really a calque, because it is actually grammatically OK and so forth, but the problem is that it's just not the normal way of saying something. Take the English sentence:

I didn't have a choice!

I don't think you could object much if someone were to translate it as:

Ní raibh rogha agam!

because there's nothing inherently wrong with it (so to speak). The thing is though, that the normal way of saying it is:

Ní raibh an dara rogha agam!

and this (i mo thuairimse in aon chaoi) serves to invalidate usage of the former translation.

Maybe this is one avenue that languages can become 'calified', via parallels in the grammar.

If there were a contiuum:

Fluent (correct idiom + correct grammar), semi-fluent (fluent grammar but not idioms), middle (seome good grammar), bad (little correct grammar) [hardly too precise a scheme, i'll admit]

there would be plenty of places to bring in calques, as there are lots of grammatically correct sentances which natives never utter, and which a non-native might. I suppose it makes emulating a native a thin line