AG026, perhaps the wrong place for this, but...

[elveonora]

In this episode, Team Rocket states that Ash and friends' Pokemon do not understand human language, that's an error or not?
Pokemon are shown to understand MOST of the time (unless they are wild) and the heroes' Pokemon do definitely.

 

[Master Cyrus]

I'm guessing they understand the intent but not the language. So if Ash is desperatly yelling at someone to get up they hear the desperation and tries to get up to not let the trainer down rather than explicitly understand the phrase get up.

 

[Magma Bomb]

That was just one of these moments where the writers were not making sense.
If Pokémon couldn't understand human language Pokémon battles would be rendered impossible as they would not be able to comprehend their trainer's commands and strategies in battle. They understand, they just can't vocalize.

 

[Dr. Buni]

The Pokémon can certainly understand human language perfectly or else they wouldn't understand commands. Pokémon are intelligent beings, unlike animals.

 

[CynthiaLover]

I agree with Reila. Pokemon are very intelligent, so they can easily have the ability to understand human language. I mean, all Pokemon talk differently (you don't hear a Garchomp saying "Pika Pika!") yet they can understand each other. It's just like humans have the general ability to understand other languages, Pokemon can too. I mean, if not, then it would be completely impossible for a Pokemon to understand a Trainer's command (for example, if a Trainer tells a Pikachu to use Thunderbolt, if it didn't understand, it would probably use a different move like Quick Attack). So the fact that Pokemon are highly intelligent, it's safe to say they can at least get the general idea of the human language. Look at Team Rocket's Meowth, he can speak the human language fluently, having taught himself over time, which not only proves that Pokemon can understand human tongues, but are also very intelligent. So the anime just made a bad blunder on that statement.

 

[Supreme Leader Palpitoad]

They understand. How can some of them(Meowth, Slowking)learn human talk if they did not?

 

[DynoStretch]

As I recall, wasn't this that really dumb Johto episode where they were trying to do a reference to Doctor Doolittle?

Officer Jenny: "Pokemon don't understand human language!"

Yeah of course they don't Jenny, that's why when your fellow officers like the ones in the Indigo League command, "Arcanine*, use Flamethrower!" their Growlithes they don't breath fire and instead just scratch behind their ears and sniff each other.

*Not a typo, lol 4kids

 

[Pokemonman44]

thats weird

 

[Muur]

Well Latias' Pokedex entry does say it can understand human language. It wouldn't say that unless it was a unique capability.

 

[~Piika]

I'd say it's an error. Meowth is proof enough; he focused on being able to make different sounds, not the meanings of human words. It's not just Meowth being a special case either, since he talks to other Pokémon using the human language and they can hold actual conversations with him.

As for the wild ones that don't seem to understand, I like to think that they don't speak English (or Japanese, or whatever). Like in the real world, if you teach a dog to sit in English, you can't give it the equivalent command in another language and expect it to understand. At the same time, dogs from all over the world can communicate with each other without problems. It makes sense to me if Pokémon were the same way.

 

[Robo-Floatzel]

I agree, and while I discussed the topic of talking Pokemon in another thread months ago, I do see Pokemon as having sentience to some extent, and given they say their own names, it IS possible for them to learn the human language much like Meowth, even though I always ignore the fact that Meowth had to forget Pay-Day, as if talking was a move, like if you had to forget how to play tennis just to learn how to speak German.

I do believe that other talking Pokemon exist in the Pokemon world, we just don't see them because they're not important to the story, after all, I do see a world BEYOND Ash's journey, that's what head-canons are for.