The other day, a client called and while explaining his training problems he exclaimed, "If the dog only knew my language, we'd have no problem!" And I thought, that's more true than he realizes! Teaching dogs to respond to verbal language is quite an undertaking really. Though we can get the behaviors happening pretty quickly, associating behaviors with verbal cues takes some time.
It takes a while for a dog to learn to discriminate (understand the difference between) different words. For some dogs, it takes longer than others. I have a young sato now, who adopted us last February in Puerto Rico. Before February, he never wore a collar or leash, never went into a crate, never rode in a car, and never heard a word of English! We all thought it was funny the way he seemed to respond to only two words: "pero" (dog) and "no!"
Imagine (I'm assuming here you don't speak any Chinese) that you went to live in China. Imagine how long it would be before your ears were really able to understand the difference between different words, especially those words that sound rather similar. It helps to have a visual (printed) word to look at when learning another language, because then we can use information from our eyes AND our ears. Granted, the words "sit" and "down" don't sound much alike to me, but if my sato is tired, to him it just sounds like "a-cue-for-something", he'll try all the different tricks we've been working on and hunt around and just guess around at what cue I am offering. I've done lots of experiments with Tigerlily (my three year old waterdog), practicing verbal discriminations when retrieving various objects, but it has taken her years to learn the difference between words like "tug toy" and "ball" and "frisbee" and she still isn't sure of the difference between words like "blanket" and "pencil."
But if I give hand signals that I also associated with the behaviors, or if we are in a certain context (playing a certain game) she is much more certain about what my cues represent. Hand signals are simply a much easier cue to discriminate, maybe because they are visual instead of auditory, but also, dogs are more naturally adept at reading body language. Running agility I sometimes shout out the wrong verbal cue, but (fortunately) my dog always pretty much ignors the dumb things coming out of my mouth and instead responds naturally to my body language!
Adding hand signals to your verbal cues makes it easier for dogs to respond correctly to your cue. Adding hand signals to your verbal cue also makes it easier for the dog learn to the verbal cue as time goes by.
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