Newbies are going to fail hard at IRC. Pretty much all of the questions Seb poses for a built-in newbie chat still exist with a built-in Freenode interface, with the addition of a complicated and often difficult (not to mention culturally... unique) environment. Much better to think along the lines of the Teahouse, but live. You can jump into a chat queue, and people who want to help chat with you, and you can close the chat whenever you want, and you can't contact people outside of the queue using chat.