Who’s a good little OP then? You are!
I thought this was about dogs who can’t speak English. 
A few years ago I witnessed a guy speaking to his Shihtzu.
“What? What do you want? Why are you begging? Do you want something to eat? But how can I get you something to eat when I don’t have my slippers, eh?”
The dog cocked its head for a second, then ran off. It returned a minute later with a slipper in its mouth.
“Well, that is fine, but where is the other one?”
Once again the dog ran off.
Now, I don’t claim to be telepathic, especially with dogs, but I knew exactly what this dog was thinking when it returned for the second time. “Fetching a slipper, fetching a slipper, fetching a – ooh, living room!”
And it was actually published:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/304/5677/1682
That particular dog may have been a little bit exceptional, though.
I’m colorblind. That doesn’t mean black and white.
Like the Perfect Master says, some colors they’re good at, some they’re bad at.
This is exactly the kind of conversation I have with the poodle. And pretty much the exact result. Sometimes there’s a ‘TRY THE GUEST ROOM’ thrown in as she runs off, in the wrong direction, leading to the dog either going to the guest room, or, ignoring it, trying where she thinks it is, then going for the guest room if it’s not there. (Sometimes she’s more right than I am.)
I’m gonna say her vocabulary is easily bigger than 200 words. This is not unusual for a standard.
Look, I think we should leave poodles out of the discussion. They’re too smart, and skew the data.
Had a poodle as a kid (fun sidenote: let it go all shaggy, and it looks nothing like a poodle!). Smartest dog. Now I have “normal” dogs, and I forget that they haven’t been cataloging human vocabulary (and the spelling therof) like the poodle did.
OK, but to even it out, we should probably eliminate yellow labs as well.
Actually, I used to hang out with a yellow lab. One day we were playing with a tennis ball. I was getting tired of taking the ball out of her mouth to throw it again, so I just said “Drop it.” And she did. Apparently she knew that command pretty well.
One of our canine owners is a min-pin and she is pretty doggone intelligent for a critter scarcely the size of a large squirrel.
She definitely knows the following phrases:
Where’s Mommy?
Where’s Daddy?
Wanna go outside?
Wanna go for a ride?
How about a bath?
Get out of there.
Come here.
Down.
No.
Sit.
Quiet.
My dear bride swears that Cesar Milan (the dog whisperer) is not full of crap.
Some of his techniques do seem to work in practice.
I swear, hand a Doper a straight line . . .
Oy.
And yes, some dogs are very smart. I get the feeling that my little min-pin/Italian Greyhound mix is picking up words at an astonishing doggie rate. The problem, though, is not the smart dogs. At least not until they get opposable thumbs. It’s the dumb owners.
LOL. Are you serious? Your dog can fucking spell?
This dog can understand spelling. For a few words. Before we gave up. She can type too. Problem is, all her books start off “I-T W-A-S A D-A-R-K A-N-D S-T-O-R-M-Y N-I-G-H-T.”
(Okay, she just looks like Snoopy there.)
MOL, you never had a dog learn what ‘W-A-L-K’ means from context? Even a Golden can do that.
No, of course dogs don’t speak English. Dogs don’t speak Spanish. Dogs don’t speak German. It is a little-known fact, however, that dogs do speak Korean. (But they wish they didn’t.)
A dog might learn “Hey, these sounds mean to do this action” through context, but your dog can’t spell, can’t read, can’t type, and has no idea what you’re talking about when you ask “Who’s a good boy?” but suspects you might want to play, which is why you’re all in his face, petting him.
MOL, the dog is about as smart as a two to three year old. She can’t spell, can’t read, can’t type (but in the photo, looks like Snoopy, who could), but she does know who’s a good girl. What CanvasShoes said is that the dog understands spelling, not that it can spell. It’s smart enough to trigger on the ‘w’ nose, and put together one and two to get ‘walkies’ or ‘out’. Dogs can do a lot of things no other animal can do without significant training. One of them is what happens when you point at something. A dog’ll look at it. Most animals will look at your hand. It is entirely without question that dogs can understand words in sentences, and can be taught to perform ‘get me the blue ball’ versus ‘get me the ball’ versus ‘get me the biggest ball’.
Poodles are smart enough to really knock off the curve: they don’t have tricks. They just have things they do. Unless you’re going for multiple-stage circus performances, you can generally tell them to do something and they will, if they understand what you told them. “Go find Mommy. Bring her to me.” is a classic. (As is ‘where’s the damn remote’. Most dogs I’ve owned pick that one up. Generally, I don’t train them for it.) I believe Border Collies are equally as smart, if not smarter, but they’re slightly more specialized: they’ll pick up needful things, but they won’t pick up random things to do as often. (like moving the chair a few feet so they can lie on it to stare out the window to watch the birdfeeder. (which is what happened slightly before that picture.))
My mom has the same basic problem, though she doesn’t tend to yell at her dog. She just literally treats her dog (a sweet little maltese) like a baby. For example, I hate to visit her house because the whole things absolutely reeks of dog piss. It reeks of dog piss because my mom won’t train the dog not to piss in the house. Oh, she thinks she’s training her. See, when Jackie the Dog pisses or shits on the carpet, mom cleans it up, takes Jackie by the front paw so she’s standing on her hind legs, walks her to the bathroom, puts the tissue in the toilet and then uses Jackie’s little paw to flush the toilet.
In this way Jackie learns absolutely nothing but Mom crows about how she’s potty-training her.
This is a conceit people maintain, but some of it’s wrong. I’ll grant they can’t type or spell (although some animals can count, and Alex the parrot was being taught to spell at one point before his untimely death).
The science referenced above shows that dogs can learn words – not just tone of voice and human emotion.
Heck, speaking unscientifically, even my little rescued pit bull learned to differentiate her name, in any tone of voice, from very similar sounds when I was training her. I kept trying to trip her up by using bemoan and intone and Stallone instead of Simone, and varied my voice, volume, pacing, and where I was looking. It does seem like she listens for the entire word with all its phonemes.
I don’t think I will ever know if my cat can understand English. Her response to anything I do is a contemptuous, disdainful glare.
So then with “W-A-L-K” for example, you would agree that the dog is probably learning that as a word, and not as four distinct letters that are making up the spelling of a word. So even if your dog processes “W-A-L-K” as a word, and has learned that Simone is her name, you’re not going to be able to walk up to her one day and go “S-I-M-O-N-E, come here!” and have her come running. I dunno, maybe if your dog is Brian Griffin, but then you’ve got other problems, like your dog being an alcoholic who wants to bone your wife.
Oh, she understands all right my friend, I think we can be sure of that…