Happy Saturday!

Today I want to talk about something a bit outside English learning, but still somewhat related.

So two weeks ago, I came across this post on Instagram, saying a dog was about to be put down if no one adopted him.

To be honest, I had never been a dog person my whole life. Yes, I do have a lot of pets and plants, and I take really good care of them. But a dog??? That's a different GAME!

My cat has been battling a lot of medical problems her whole life — everything from autoimmune disease to renal failure.

It took her so much drama to get to this point — celebrating her 9th year on earth.

I know it's not an easy commitment to be a pawrent.

I still have a bearded dragon and two pacman frogs. That's a lot to juggle already, right?

Is it a good time to start having a dog? HECK NO!!!

But I couldn't sleep without thinking what could happen to that poor furry buddy.

So the next two weeks — I taught myself to keep and train a dog on Deepseek. lol

I even popped down to a pet shop and asked a lot of questions.

I spoke to the foster parent, who will leave Hong Kong for good soon, about all the routines and quirks that I should learn.

And now... Otter is here. Molding into our family.

It's a whirlwind before my husband could react properly, lol. But he's always been this go-with-the-flow guy his whole life. He will just take whatever comes.

And bam — here I am, raising a human + a dog + a cat + a bearded dragon and 2 pacman frogs.

Oh by the way, did I tell you that I wanted to homeschool my girl starting from 2027?

Jeez, I don't know why I wanted to give myself so many new challenges. You might think I LOVE new challenges — quite the opposite, I actually prefer stability, MUCH prefer.

But I just know what should go into my own desired stability — a happy family life.

Oh... it's getting a bit long. I guess I didn't give you any "instant English lessons" like you would have hoped for.

Well, because learning a language is not about "detaching the vocabulary/grammar/pronunciation" from life — language is life.

Instead you should have this "BICS instinct" turned on, so you can capture real-life English from your environment.

Wondering how you can learn to speak with so many lively phrases? Because I know how to turn the language environment into my best language teacher.

And I am sure you can do the same too, with my secrets.

Send me 5 phrases that you learned from this email, then I will give you a $500 coupon to join "From Chinglish to English". (It's a $1270 course, only the active learners deserve this special price at $770.)

Happy learning,

Ms. Truda