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Parrots are famous throughout the World, not only because of their exotic, colorful and cheerful looks, but also for their unique ability to reproduce words with a precision that often knocks at the door between fun and scary. When you hear about a “talking parrot” don’t get confused thinking one could engage in minor chit chat with it, the words they reproduce are basically “recordings”, but admittedly, they will also learn how to respond to some sentences or words, with their own.

As long as you don’t overload their vocabulary, parrots can be thought to say almost anything you want them too, as long as you keep it clear and simple. It’s evident that you’ll have an easier time teaching your parrot to say “I love you” rather than the German “Luftschiffkapitän”, since it’s clearer and easier to pronounce (that doesn’t mean that parrots prefer English to German though). And yes, I know what you’re thinking, parrots can be easily trained to swear and they can even learn to swear without any training, simply by living in an environment where curses are used all the time.

The story of Charlie the Cursing parrot is of notoriety, the 50 year old parrot belonging to Winston Churchill being thought to throw curses at the Nazis during the Second World War.

But getting back to how you can teach your parrot to talk, there are basically two main strategies you can undergo. One would be to buy a training tape and place it near his cage. These tapes repeat specific sentences or words over and over again and many owners leave them on and on auto-repeat while they’re off to work. Eventually, your parrot will start to grasp and reproduce the sounds he hears, but this method is extremely annoying for him. Because it looks more like a torture method rather than a training one, most parrot owners tend to go the “hard way”.

The hard way means that you’ll have to personally take care of the parrot’s training. It’s obviously best if you start doing so while he’s at a younger age, relating an action (such as feeding him for example) with a word or sentence. For example, every time you hand-feed the parrot, say “Thank you!”. After a while, if you keep focusing on these words, he’ll form a link between them and getting fed and he’ll start reproducing the sounds when you hand-feed him. You could also give him a reward when you hear him “talking”, so he’ll be more eager to pronounce the words.

To conclude, you should take note that some parrots are less trainable than others in this regard. Amazons and Conures are known to be great talkers, whereas Lorikeets are commonly regarded as less likely to be successfully trained to reproduce sounds. Some species only start talking at older ages (such as the African Greys for example) whereas others are extremely chatty even in their first few years. Even if you own a parrot that is less likely to talk, training him in this direction is extremely fun (actually, experienced parrot trainers state that it’s more fun to successfully train a parrot that doesn’t have an affinity for sound reproduction, rather than one that’s considered chatty by nature) so you should make the best of it.

# posted by Medical Information : 5:18 AM