I am the only deaf person in my family. I’m 24 years old and none of them learned ASL or only took one course. They hardly know the alphabet and can say “bathroom”. I do not go to my family gatherings because no one is able to communicate with me. When they do, they talk REALLY loud and only ask me “small talk” questions. They are hell bent on me coming around, because “we’re a family and we love you”.

Background Just over a month ago I decided to start learning Italian. I have previously studied French and Spanish and can speak both languages fairly confidently (though French perhaps more so than Spanish), so I began studying Italian with an idea of what works for me when it comes to the study of Romance languages. I had previously written of my desire to compare my experience learning Italian in 2017 to my experiences learning other languages, particularly Romance languages, in previous years when I was still trying to consolidate something resembling a coherent language learning strategy.

When I started learning languages in my late teenage years, I began with French and Persian. French, like most European languages, uses an alphabetic writing system, whereas Persian, like many languages in the Middle East uses an abjad writing system. I later also learned north Indian languages which use abugida writing systems, and last year I began learning Japanese which makes use of both syllabic and logographic writing systems. If you’re reading this article you’ll be familiar with alphabetic writing systems, where individual symbols generally represent both vowels and consonants.

Over the weekend it was decided that this year’s wedding anniversary would be celebrated somewhere in Italy. It has been a long time since I last had any extended exposure to Romance languages. My French and Spanish are still fairly strong, though I rarely have the chance to speak either at any great length these days. I’ve flirted with the idea of learning Italian many times over the years, though I have always ended up deciding not to.

At some point over the last two weeks I came across a subreddit about ’non zero days’. As far as I can tell, the community on Reddit sprung up in response to a comment made by ryans01: Rule numero uno - There are no more zero days. What’s a zero day? A zero day is when you don’t do a single fucking thing towards whatever dream or goal or want or whatever that you got going on.