[3.5] Animal Companion - Speak Language

[Bronk]

When an animal companion gains hit dice, that includes skill points that the player can assign for the companion. If a player puts two skill points into Speak Language for the animal, as a DM, how much would you say the animal understands when it hears the new language it knows? Would it only be that the animal understands the commands for the tricks it knows in that language? Like a dog trainer teaching an attack dog to only respond to German commands to make it more difficult for a foe to command the dog? Or would it be able to pick up the gist of conversations, so if the druid uses the animal as a spy, then later uses Speak with Animals, they can get the gist of conversations the animal may have overheard?

This can never come up, because Speak Language isn't a class skill for animals (not being listed in any of their stat blocks), and because animals have such low intelligence scores that they always get the minimum of one skill point per level. To take a cross class skill, they would need two.

My thinking is that if an animal can learn a language well enough to remember details of a conversation, does it understand the language well enough to be told complex commands in that language? Doesn't that completely obviate the need for tricks that the animal is supposed to learn? I do not want to quash creativity among my players, though.

This does get confusing when a druid casts 'speak with animals'. How smart is it when you're interacting with it with the spell? It's all up to the DM at that point. (Same with plants and 'speak with plants', really.)