You will see why a learned word does not work everywhere, and what your dog actually took away instead of what you meant to teach it.
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It knows sit, it does it in the kitchen, it does not do it at the park. The usual conclusion is disobedience. It may never have learned what you think.
When you teach a cue, the dog records everything that comes with it: the sound, but also the tone, where you stand, the room, the time of day, what you are holding.
Nothing tells it which of those parts are supposed to matter. It keeps the whole bundle, and it responds to the whole bundle.
That is why a word seems to vanish as soon as the setting changes. What changed is not its willingness, it is the cue itself.
Most training happens in one posture: the person is upright, facing the dog, and the dog is looking up at them.
Ask for the same thing while sitting on a sofa, with your back turned, or on the move, and you often get a dog that hesitates. It is not pretending: it has never seen that version.
Deliberately varying your own position during training costs little and heads off that surprise.
A word of prohibition interrupts, sometimes. It never points to the conduct you want. The dog stops, starts again, then tries something else.
That is what lies behind whole days spent repeating the same word: the interruption installs nothing, so the situation comes back unchanged.
Replacing the prohibition with a request, however simple, gives the dog something to do and gives you something to reward.
The name is there to say look at me, I have something for you. Used on its own to break up mischief, called into empty space, or fired off twenty times running, it turns into background noise.
A dog that only hears its name in unpleasant moments learns to stop lifting its head. That is clean learning, and it is hard to undo.
The check is easy: say it once, in a quiet room, asking for nothing. If the head does not turn, the name needs rebuilding.
When the gesture and the word say two different things, many dogs follow the gesture. Your hand dropping, your shoulders, the way your feet point speak louder than the sentence.
That is why visual cues often appear without anyone teaching them, and work better than carefully chosen words.
Checking what your body is doing while you talk is more useful than hunting for better vocabulary.
The absence of a response is information. A dog that pesters and gets nothing learns, slowly, that this particular conduct leads nowhere.
That only works if the silence is complete and consistent. An irritated look, a sigh, a not now are enough to keep the behaviour going.
And it only applies to ordinary demands. A dog insisting in an unusual way is asking to be looked at, not ignored.