I’ve moved into an apartment with a few friends and a total of three dogs. The oldest is about a year and the youngest is about 3 months, the middle one at around 7 months.

I’m the only native English speaker in the house and so when trying to train the dogs to do various things, like sit, Mandarin gets to be the default. I don’t know how dogs do language. I do know that they can differentiate between different commands, as any dog owner knows. They each know their own names and each other’s names. Not only that, they know at least one of the names of my roommates. I know this because one of them particularly likes that roommate and if you say that person’s name in the afternoon the dog gets all worked up, expecting that the roommate is arriving home from work.

Maybe I’m projecting, but I don’t think so and neither do any of the other people who live here.

I once heard when I was young that dogs do well distinguishing between vowel sounds better than stops. In other words “sit” and “shit” sound more or less the same to them. Each of the three dogs has a two syllable name with distinctly different vowel combinations. If it’s true that they do vowels better than consonants, I wonder if dogs have more trouble with Mandarin and its limited set of possible syllables as compared to English. But then maybe that’s just because I’m the only English speaker in the apartment.

The experiment I propose is this: The youngest dog is just starting to get trained to respond to commands. We’ve all agreed that “sit” [sɪʔ] is a better choice of command than 坐下. What I would like to do is give the dog three additional things to learn. For each command, one arbitrary syllable would be used. Let’s say “pei”. So péi might be “heel”, pèi could be play dead and pēi could be “hey dog, come get a treat”. Then after a couple months of consistently doing this, see if the dog could make the distinctions for the commands.

Why this is a bad idea: If there’s punishment and reward for doing the task, or even if there’s just reward and reward being withheld, it seems you could really give your dog a complex. I really like these dogs, but more than anything I would like for them to just stop pissing on my bed, so their mental health is actually something I value quite highly if it can help me have a dry bed to get into at night.

The other reason it’s a bad idea: I’m having a hard enough time getting my roommates to pronounce “sit” consistently. Asking them to commit to memory three arbitrary tones on an arbitrary syllable, and then getting them to do that consistently may be asking too much. Not due to a stupidity of my roommates (they’re not stupid) but rather the perceived (or real) stupidity of the experiment.