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The Welsh establishment has an official goal about the language, but its real aim is quite different. 
The fake goal: "a million Welsh speakers by 2050".
The real goal is just to increase the amount of Welsh that gets spoken in people's day-to-day lives.
Both laudable goals, but they're different things, and when I believed in the fake goal I had DREADFUL cognitive dissonance.
When you believe the govt literally wants to create more speakers by teaching more people, you wonder why the learning providers don't seem to give a shit about exams and will make the admin around getting to sit one so offputting.
When you understand they don't give a shit about the standard learners reach because the real goal is all about getting them to use the language, the whole thing makes waaaaay more sense.
When you think they're trying to teach lots of people, you wonder why they're fixating so much on your personal life instead of using the lesson time to teach you.
When you understand that all they care about is getting you to use your Welsh in your daily life, even when they haven't taught you more than two sentences yet, it makes a lot more sense (but it's still deeply frustrating).
I pieced the truth together and then had it inadvertently confirmed by someone who was working with the govt and blabbed too much because he thought he was amongst friends.
I'm not saying the real goal isn't laudable, but it is dishonest as fuck to lie about it. And, as ever, dishonesty wastes other people's time and cognitive resource. Not sure I would ever have started learning Welsh if I'd fully understood that everybody except me had a completely different endgame.
@griffinkate I've been learning Welsh for many years and in that time I've done a variety of courses and met numerous tutors and even more students. People on Welsh for Adults courses are learning for many different reasons, though the majority want to be able to use Welsh in their daily lives, even if it's only to pass the time of day with a Welsh speaking neighbour.
Of course I was learning long before this official goal of "a million Welsh speakers" was thought of.
@Dewines @griffinkate Whenever it comes up in the coursebooks, I encourage people to make up the most outrageous lie, but I also teach them how to say “meindia dy fusnes” fairly early on.
@griffinkate What I would say is that if you want to learn Welsh, then go ahead. It doesn't matter if your reasons don't match a top-down Welsh government goal.
Personally my goal was to be able to live as much of my life as possible in Welsh, watch TV, read Welsh novels and chat with other Welsh speakers. Focus on your own goal and ignore other people.
@griffinkate I wouldn't say that they don't care what standard people reach. There's always been encouragement to continue to the next class and to take the exams, though to be honest, most adults just want to learn and are not keen on being tested and gaining certificates, unless they need it for their work.
@Dewines Sounds like we've had very different experiences. I was actively interested in gaining qualifications and I felt like the learning providers were throwing barriers in my way - like not bothering to tell me when the deadline for registering for the exams was coming up, refusing to tell me how much the exam fees were but insisting on payment in cash, that kind of thing. At one point I sat an exam, got the qualification and then a year later they told me it wasn't real!
@griffinkate I don't know which provider runs the courses you've been doing and there's no need to name names, but this is completely alien to my experience which spans decades. (For all sorts of reasons, it took me a long time to achieve the level I'm at now.)
I used to teach in a couple of different FE colleges (not Welsh, it was IT for adults) and in my experience we had to put people in for qualifications or the courses wouldn't be funded.