Raw, pahari tota, Kashmiri raw — whatever you call it, it is the parrot most households here start with, and "when will it talk" is the first question every new owner asks.
Roughly a year is the usual answer, sometimes seven or eight months with daily work, and males tend to build the bigger vocabulary. Plenty never talk at all, which is worth knowing before you buy one specifically to talk.
How old is yours, does it talk, how long did it take, and what was the first word?
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Mine started at about 11 months. First word was "Mithu", obviously, because that is what everyone in the house had been shouting at him for a year.
Do saal ka hai mera, abhi tak kuch nahi bola. Bas seeti bajata hai. Female hai, shayad wajah yehi hai.
Eight months. My cousin's took two years. Same shop, same week, probably same nest.
✅ Accepted answer
Four raws over about fifteen years, so let me give the honest version rather than the shop version.
Ages mine started: 9 months, 11 months, about 14 months, and one who has never said a word and is now seven.
What actually predicted it, looking back:
How it was raised mattered far more than age or sex. The two that talked earliest were hand-raised chicks that had been around human voices since before they could fly. The silent one was a wild-caught adult, and looking back, expecting a bird that spent its first years in a tree to start speaking Urdu was always optimistic.
Consistency beats volume. Two short sessions a day, same phrase, same tone, same time — morning while I make tea and evening. Ten minutes each. People shout a word at the bird forty times on a Sunday and then nothing for a week, and wonder why nothing happens.
Emotion is what they latch onto. Every one of mine learned things nobody was teaching: the doorbell, my mother calling my name, the sound the microwave makes. They pick up what the household reacts to, not what you sit and drill.
The bit I want people to hear. Do not buy a raw to get a talking bird. Most of the ones sold as "will definitely talk" are sold by someone who will not be there in eighteen months. Plenty never talk, and you are committing to a loud, extremely intelligent, thirty-year animal that needs hours out of the cage. If the talking is the point, you will resent the bird, and that is how they end up alone in a cage on a balcony for twenty years.
Mine is a good bird whether or not he says anything. That has to be enough before you buy one.
"Do not buy a raw to get a talking bird" needs to be at the top of this thread. Marking it as the answer even though it is the least satisfying answer to my own question.
The doorbell thing is so true. Mine does the exact sound of my phone's ringtone and I have picked up the phone for it more times than I will admit.
Update: 26 months and she said "aja" last week. Completely out of nowhere. So to anyone whose bird is silent — it may just be later than you were told.
Congratulations, genuinely. And note it was a word somebody says to her every day rather than one anyone was drilling. That is almost always how the first one arrives.
