I just talk to my cat a lot, we have little conversations and she’s become quite vocal and usually responds if I ask her something. It started out with “Do you want your dinner?” or “What have you got there?” (when she’s watching a bird or a lizard outside, playing with a toy, caught a bug, etc) to “What does a kitty say?” “Meow!”
Cats are pretty good with vocal cues, so if you just encourage them to “speak” and pick a few words or phrases it often doesn’t take them long to pick things up. I started with clicker training, and it was surprisingly easy to replace the clicker with a vocal cue. I was surprised how easy it was to train my cat, she picked up the slightly more tricky things that I could never teach my dogs (they never worked out tricks like “shake hands” but my cat picked up “high five” and “wave” within a few weeks, and can differentiate between the two)
The book “Think like a cat” was a great help to me in learning a few fundamentals about cats, and the basics in training, positive reinforcement, encouraging a specific behaviour, and so on.
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