People do the same with Irish; it is hard to convince them otherwise. They usually want to say 'tá mé' for I am and 'nil mé' for I am not, not matter what the verb.

Sadly Irish does have conjugation of verbs. Though that is not usually where problems arise - it's with the really complicated noun and personal pronoun system (we have an awful lot of the latter which can are combined with prepositions and can only be used in certain circumstance. It drives people mad).