B:  Alright. Thank you for joining us on another episode of Speakeasy English, the number one podcast on the internet! 

L: No… no it’s not.

B:  Come on! 

B: Okay, well, it might not be the number one podcast on the internet, but it is here to help you become completely fluent in English, easily, automatically, and the free transcripts are available on our website: www.speakeasyenglish.club . Now remember, you don’t just listen to each episode once. You listen multiple times. Your passport to becoming fluent, completely fluent, is spaced repetition. That means that if you listen to each episode multiple times, for example, you listen today and again tomorrow, and then again in three days, that will be very powerful for your brain to acquire English automatically, so you don’t have to study boring grammar and flashcards. That’s the goal, right? Nobody wants to study grammar. 

So, as you may have noticed, there’s another voice here with us today. Joining us today is my lovely wife, Leigh. Say hi Leigh. 

L:  Hello. English speakers. 

B: So Leigh is a native English speaker, as you might guess, and I thought I would invite her on the pod to offer you another voice. Because, you know, I know you love listening to my voice, but it’s probably a good idea to get exposure to multiple voices and multiple ways of speaking. So, Leigh, how long have we been married? 

L: We’ve been married nine, going on ten years this year. 

B: Was it the best nine years of your life?

L: Um. The best. 

B: They say that time flies when you’re having fun. 

L: Exactly. Yeah. 

B: That’s an expression in English, that “time flies”. So it goes quickly when you are enjoying yourself. Uh, Leigh, have you been enjoying yourself? 

L: I’ve been enjoying myself. 

B: Okay. Alright. Good. So you may have noticed we have not published an episode since, uh, sometime in December. So my goal is to publish an episode every two weeks, and obviously that has not happened. So, Leigh, what has been going on in our lives that has made it more difficult to find time to write and record podcasts? 

L: Well, uh, we just recently acquired a new puppy. 

B: A puppy, a young dog, a baby dog, a baby dog. What type of dog is it? 

L: It is a Doberman, a Doberman, a red Doberman.

B: A red Doberman. Okay, so Dobermans, as you might know, come in two main color schemes. One is mostly black and one is mostly a rusty brown. They call it red. So we got a red Doberman. Is it a boy or a girl? 

L: And it’s a boy. 

B: It’s a boy. Alright. Leigh, what did, uh, what did we name him? 

L: Well, naming him was, uh, a whole thing because we talked about the name Echo. We really… the kids liked Echo…

B: Hold on, hold on. So we’ll talk about the kids. Let’s back up. 

L: Back up three years!

B: Yeah, let’s back up three years. No, we won’t, we won’t go that far back. But let’s let’s back up 2 or 3 months when we, when we decided that we would be bringing home a new dog. 

L: We had to get our triplet toddlers on board. We wanted… We told them we were getting a girl dog and that’s what we were planning for.  

B: So, we had, in other words, we had originally planned to get a female dog, and we told our three kids, our triplets, that we were going to get a female dog. 

L: Yeah and we gave them choices of names. We gave them two choices and they picked “Echo” 

B: Well, what were the two choices for names, originally?

L: It was Echo and Storm, but the kids are afraid of storms, so they said that was too scary. So they liked Echo better. 

B:Yeah. So we were between Echo and Storm and we liked storm as a name for a dog. I think that is a good name for a dog. But storms, you know, when you are 2 or 3 years old, can be quite scary. So. So we went with Echo. We chose Echo as the name of the dog, uh, again for a female dog. 

L: And then the breeder told us that there weren’t any female dogs available. Would we want a male dog? And we decided yes, we would go with a male dog, but we still liked Echo as a name, so we were still going to go with that. 

B:  So we were still going to use echo. No. Ha! Oh yes, yes, yes, we were still going to use Echo as the name of the dog, (L: the male dog), the male dog, because we decided that Echo is not gender specific. It’s not feminine or masculine. It’s not like Victoria or Thor. You know, it’s not definitely male or definitely female. So we chose to continue with the name Echo, especially because why? 

L: Because we had been talking about it so much with the kids. Uh, they were all set on Echo and we talked about Echo coming home. We talked about what Echo would eat, and Echo would poop and pee outside. So yes, we were all set on Echo and then…

B: And then, well, uh, two things. Um, so before we went to pick up the dog, some of our family members had mentioned their surprise that we were naming the dog Echo, even though we were getting a boy dog now. So in other words, they thought the name Echo was more suited for a female dog. We disagreed and basically ignored those ideas and said no, Echo is fine for a boy dog. But when we went to pick up the dog from the breeder, the breeder was also totally surprised and dismayed that we were using the name Echo for a male Doberman. And she was sure to tell us that every Echo that she knows is a female, and so we should probably change the name. 

L: But also it wasn’t. It wasn’t just her. It was… we met the dog and it didn’t seem like an Echo to us. It just didn’t fit his look, his personality. So we went back to the drawing (board). 

B: That’s true. When we met the dog and we were bringing the dog home, it just… Something just did not seem right about the name Echo for him. And so, um, actually, how did how did we come up with a new name Leigh? 

L: I call him “Chad”, but ChatGPT! 

B: ChatGPT. So, uh, you know, the artificial intelligence company, um, owned by OpenAI, um, it’s called ChatGPT. And Leigh refers to it as “Chad”, uh, which is a name, a name in English. Um, and she thinks it’s funny to call ChatGPT “Chad”. So, anyway, “Chad” helped us find a new name. We asked ChatGPT for a list of male dog names. Actually, I asked for 20 names, four different times, so I ended up with 80 names and we looked through all the names. And we really liked…

L: Koda!

B: K O D A 

L: So we got home and told the kids we renamed the dog. That was difficult, uh, even for us, because we kept calling… We kept calling the dog Echo. 

B:  Yeah, well, we had spent how many months? 

L: The prior three months talking about “Echo… Echo, our dog… We’re bringing Echo home.” And at the last minute they meet the puppy and we say, “actually, we think Koda is a better name”, but we sweetened the deal by saying “Koda-bear” because they like bears. They like animals. 

B: Yeah. So we had spent, just to reiterate, we had spent the last few months talking over and over about Echo and how to, uh, how to behave around Echo and how to pet Echo and how to help us train Echo. And then we got home and said, “just kidding, we changed the name of the dog, and now the dog is named Koda.” And this was actually difficult for us too like… 

L: Maybe more difficult…

B: Maybe more difficult for us because we had really internalized, we had memorized, it became natural for us to say Echo. And so even today, after having the dog for a couple of weeks, three weeks, I still want to call him Echo, even though his name is Koda. Because we spent three months talking about Echo. So it’s hard to change the name, uh, of a pet. But that’s what we did. And to, as Leigh said, to “sweeten the deal”, which is an expression – it means to make something more attractive, to make something more acceptable, more palatable, you add a little bit of extra to get the deal done, to make it happen. And so, to make the kids accept the new name, we invented a nickname, which is a cute variation, a different way of saying the name. We invented a nickname for Koda, and we call him…

L: Koda-bear!

B: Koda bear! You know, a bear is an animal. Oso, in Spanish. A bear is a big, ferocious, or just fuzzy animal, like a stuffed animal. And so the kids really like to call him “Koda-bear”, and that’s his nickname for the kids. I do want to do an entire episode on the similarities (and differences, if there are any), between raising a puppy and raising kids. Haha. We are now… We are subject matter experts because we have a puppy and we have triplets that are three years old. So… 

L: And at the same time.

B: And at the same time! So I don’t know anyone more qualified to compare raising a puppy and raising humans than us. So I do want to do an entire episode devoted to that. But in the interest of keeping each episode short so you can listen and repeat, we will just talk briefly about what the best and worst parts of bringing home this new puppy were for us. So, Leigh, what was the… what is the hardest part of having a new puppy on top of having triplet three-year-olds in the house? 

L: Well, I’ll give you two. Potty training. I mean, potty training a puppy…

B: the kids or the dog? 

L: Well, the kids are currently potty trained. But we did that prior to getting the puppy, so that helped. But potty training a human, or a dog, is difficult. So that’s number one.

B: So teaching the dog… what do you mean by potty training? 

L: Teaching the puppy to pee and poop outside. That’s where we would like the puppy to go. 

B: So put the caca and the peepee in the grass. Not in our house. Alright, so that’s thing number one. What made that a little harder than it should have been? …. … I’ll help you. When we brought home the dog. It was, and this is in Fahrenheit, you know, we don’t use Celsius, but it was negative, the day we brought home the dog, it was -15°F. 

L: The coldest it’s been.

B: Yeah, the coldest it has been all winter. And it stayed that cold for the first week that we had the dog. So try teaching a seven week old dog that it’s a good idea to go outside when it’s -15 degrees. So cold. It is just very, very hard to convince a puppy that it should go outside to pee and poop when it’s this cold. So what, what was, you said there were two things for you that were the most difficult, what was the other thing? 

L: With having toddlers and a puppy at the same time, is nipping. So nipping is like little bites. Um, it’s not a full on bite. Puppies don’t normally full on bite you, but they nip. All puppies do this and they have sharp little puppy teeth, and it’s annoying to an adult, but it hurts little kids. So…

B: So nipping is like what? Like when they’re trying to play. 

L: Yeah. Get your attention. 

B: They play, and they play with their mouths obviously because they don’t have hands, right? So when they play with their siblings, they just kind of…

L: They bite on their fur, yea, and on their ears. 

B: They’re not trying to hurt anybody. But that’s how they play, right. Um, so what’s hard about that? 

L: The kids don’t understand that. That’s just what puppies do. And, uh, the dog doesn’t understand that it’s not supposed to do that yet. Um, so there’s a lot of tears, but it’s not… it doesn’t hurt. It’s just… 

B: By there’s a lot of tears. What? What do you mean? There are a lot of tears? 

L: There are a lot of tears from the children. From the kids.

B: So they’re crying, in other words.  So the the puppy is trying to play with the kids and he’s, he’s giving little bites. Right. Little nips. But the teeth are so sharp and the kids don’t understand. 

L: They don’t like that way of playing. We don’t like that way of playing either.

B: Yeah, they don’t want… They don’t like that either. So I think that’s probably right. Those two are my… those are my two most difficult things as well. The trying to potty train the dog – and trying to teach it that humans don’t want to be bit, right? You cannot, you cannot nip or bite humans, even if you are playing. So that is difficult. Okay. And so Leigh, what is the best part about bringing the new puppy? 

L: I’m excited to see the kids grow up with the dog, and the dog grow up with the kids, and then be able to go for walks with the dog and play… and it just be another best friend for them. I think that’s going to be really heartwarming to see.

B: Yeah, heartwarming means satisfying. It just fills you up. It makes you feel… It makes you feel good inside. And I agree 100%. I think having a dog in the home is a wonderful way to teach the kids compassion for animals, responsibility, taking care of animals and feeding them, loving them, training them! So I think that’s awesome. And then, on top of that, for me, there are two other reasons that I love having this new dog in our house. 

One is because this dog already looks intimidating. He is very nice, but he looks a little bit scary. And I wanted a smart dog that is big and intimidating enough to protect my children while they are playing in our yard. We don’t live in a super dangerous area, but bad people are everywhere. And as a parent, I want the dog that is in my yard with my kids to be intimidating. I want this dog to make any bad guy think twice before coming on to our property. 

Second, I just love dogs. I just love having a dog in the household. I am obsessed with dogs and I always have been. I’m the type of guy that pets every dog that I see when I am out. If there is a dog walking down the sidewalk, I stop and ask if I can say hello, and I pet that dog. So, selfishly, I just really wanted to have a dog in the household. So for both of us, those are the best and worst parts of bringing home a new Doberman into our household with three three-year-olds. It has been crazy, but fulfilling, and rewarding and I would not trade it for the world. 

So now you know why I have not been able to record and post new episodes throughout the last month, but I am committed to publishing a lot of new material in 2024, this year, to help you become completely fluent in English. 

Thank you so much for joining us for the entire episode. I really appreciate your support, and I hope you appreciate having this free resource to help you become completely fluent in English, automatically. Nobody wants to study grammar, and I am here to tell you that you do not have to do that. You do not have to do any boring memorization or studying grammar and boring books. All you need to do is to create the daily habit of listening to English. If you can do that, you will become fluent. Don’t be in a hurry. This is not something that happens overnight. This is something that will take a long time, months or years. But it will happen and it will happen automatically if you listen to English every day. 

Now, when I say listen, I don’t mean playing English audio in the background. I mean actively listening, using your brain to understand the content, to understand the words and sentences that I am saying. If you do that every day, that will make you fluent! 

Alright, thanks again. And don’t forget to leave a five star review if this podcast is helping you to become fluent in English. You can also send me an email with any comments or questions or concerns. My email address is brandon@speakeasyenglish.club . Speaking of emails, I want to say a special thank you to those who have reached out and asked if I was okay and if we would be publishing new episodes this year. So I received a number of emails, but a special thank you to Klara, from Prague, I believe, and Maryse, I believe also from the Czech Republic. So thank you so much. Your emails motivate me to continue providing this content, and I really appreciate it. I just sincerely hope that what I’m doing here is helping you. Okay, that will end this episode. Don’t forget to listen multiple times. And until the next episode, cheers!