My collie mix is so smart my wife and I have to speak an archaic form of English around him and time we discuss anything that might excite him because he learns standard English so fast. At first I thought he was just picking up on single words like walk, park, leash etc so we switched to versions of those that he doesn’t know but he still understood. I thought he must be picking up on words like ‘go to the’ or ‘take the dogs’ so we changed that too, still no good. At this point we use a mixture of archaic words or inaccurate but somewhat fitting words and even put them in an uncharacteristic order to throw him off.

“I’m taking the dogs to the park where is the leash” turns into something like

“Off to the beloved grassy place I meander with the 4 legs, where be his bridle?”

You can’t use the same phase for too long before he starts to learn it. The upside is he is extremely easy to train. I can train him to do almost anything a dog is capable of doing in 5 mins. He also enforces rules on our other dog. If for example she picks up something belongs to us humans the genius will attack(play fight) her. We don’t even tell him what is and isn’t off limits since he was a puppy, he just seems to know what belongs to the dogs and what doesn’t.

If you speak directly to him for a while he will try to mimic our speech. He can’t quite make the right sounds but he gets close and he clearly trying to match the sounds we make.

He tattles on the other dog if she does something he thinks we wouldn’t like. He will come and paw at you and stares a hole in your head until you follow him and find the mess she made.