عمري ما اتبنيت حيوان اليف قبل كده.

Literally, عمري means my life or my lifetime. In Egyptian Arabic, عمري ما + past verb is a very common expression meaning I have never... or never in my life have I....

So here, عمري ما does not mean my age. It means something like in all my life, never.

Arabic often does not need a separate word for I.

Here, I is already built into the sentence:

• -ت in اتبنيت shows I in the past tense
• -ي in عمري means my

So you do not need أنا unless you want extra emphasis.

Because Egyptian Arabic usually uses the past tense for life-experience statements like this.

With expressions such as عمري ما and قبل كده, the past tense gives the same meaning that English often expresses with the present perfect.

So:

• عمري ما اتبنيت...
  naturally means
• I’ve never adopted...

It comes from the verb يتبنّى, which means to adopt.

In this sentence, اتبنيت means I adopted.

In informal Egyptian writing, spellings can vary, and you may also see اتبنّيت. The meaning is the same here.

Yes, that can confuse learners at first.

But in this sentence, the meaning is clearly I adopted, because حيوان أليف is the thing being adopted. In other words, it is functioning as the object of the verb.

So here:

• اتبنيت حيوان أليف = I adopted a pet

not

• I was adopted

Literally, it means a tame/domesticated animal.

In normal usage, though, it is simply the common way to say a pet. So Arabic uses a phrase here where English usually uses one word.

Because in Arabic, adjectives normally come after the noun they describe.

So:

• حيوان = animal
• أليف = tame / domesticated / pet

This is normal Arabic word order for noun + adjective.

It means before that, or more naturally in English here, before or before now.

In this sentence, it helps create the idea of I’ve never done this before.

A little, yes—but it is still very natural.

They work together like this:

• عمري ما = never in my life
• قبل كده = before / before now

English does the same thing in sentences like I’ve never adopted a pet before. So the repetition sounds conversational, not wrong.

In informal Arabic writing, especially in dialect, people often leave out the hamza.

So:

• اليف is a casual spelling of
• أليف

You will see this kind of simplified spelling a lot in Egyptian Arabic online and in text messages.

Yes. A very similar natural version would be:

أنا عمري ما اتبنيت حيوان أليف قبل كده

Adding أنا just makes the I explicit for emphasis. The original sentence is also fine without it.