Prof. Adélie Brightbeam

The basic answer is that they don’t!

Pokémon don’t naturally, inherently understand words. (No more than you or I, at least! We all learned language in our brains, not our blood.) But they do understand people.

Obviously, this varies to some extent (depending on both the person and the Pokémon, and how well they can get on one another’s wavelength), but the connections that form between Pokémon and humans are very real, and the varying effects of this connection are still being discovered and studied!

When the humans instructed the Pokémon to use moves they were familiar with, the Pokémon could use those moves!

It depends! But in the most basic sense, training service pokemon is about identifying a need and then coming up with actions that a pokemon could perform to meet that need.

tail-fanning is what i described earlier; wooper eggs need high levels of oxygen to develop and hatch properly, and denmasters use their keeled tails to fan the water surrounding their eggs to increase oxygen flow.

egg agitating describes a denmaster using his nose and face to move his eggs around. while the primary purpose for this is that wooper eggs also must be stirred to a certain extent to develop right, denmasters perform this behavior more often than necessary for that sole reason. thus, it's believed denmasters also do this to check for infertile, dead, or infected eggs, as well as probe for small nest predators. 'sire have poor eyesight, hence why they use their face for this task.

filial cannibalism, as you may have already guessed, is the consumption of eggs and/or offspring by the parent(s). it may seem contradictory to describe this behavior as parental care, but in 'sire, denmasters will consume dead/infertile eggs and eggs infected with aquatic fungi to prevent the spread of disease related to decomposition or infection. so, researchers dubbed this phenomenon "hygienic filial cannibalism".

you’re almost certainly familiar with drifloon’s supposed habit of whisking children away- you might even be able to point to a few news stories outlining those exact sort of events. many people say that drifloon like to drag kids away to the afterlife, or to eat their soul or whatever.

and honestly- there is some truth to these stories. there are a fair amount of concrete, well-founded accounts of drifloon leading kids away from parks or out of backyards or playgrounds, who are later found deceased or badly injured, or rarely never found at all.

but that’s where the truth of it ends. for one, drifloon aren’t really able to drag anyone away by force like some believe. drifloon are extremely passive in terms of locomotion, unable to put much force behind their movements and being blown away by stiff breezes, they wouldn’t be able to generate the force needed to lift more than, like, a newborn baby, let alone a school-aged child.

secondly, drifloon really have no reason to be leading people away. it isn’t a predatory behavior, drifloon aren’t active predators for anything more than tiny flying (mostly non-pokemon) insects. they’re very energy efficient, passive feeders, going wherever the wind blows and grabbing small insects that wander (or are blown) too close with their tendrils. additionally, there’s no evidence they feed on psychic/spiritual energy like some ghost pokemon (ie litwick), so there’s zero reason for them to take anyone away in the first place.

so then, how do we explain the deaths and disappearances related to drifloon? its worth noting that such events are very uncommon, despite the fact that drifloon are found in almost every corner of the globe (and have been going down since these stories have become more widely-told). what’s far more common are cases of kids being missing for only a few minutes to a couple hours, being found, unharmed, playing with drifloon nearby from where they disappeared from.

what’s happening here is that drifloon, like many smaller pokemon, are playful, and view humans (especially kids more their size) as potential friends. so, they’ll wander into parks or playgrounds where kids are playing. but drifloon aren’t people, and they don’t really understand things like “kids need to stay in the playground and not wander off” or “forests, rough terrain, and cliffy areas can be dangerous for people, who cannot float”. an unsupervised child might wander off with their newfound friend (as many kids are prone to doing) and inadvertently into danger, whether that means aggressive wild pokemon, or falls off of ledges. to lend credence to this, there was a case a few years ago of a child who disappeared from a park in paldea following a drifloon, and was found injured soon after- because the drifloon that had befriended them had gone to find help, and led rescuers to the child’s location.