Burman is anything but easy to acquire. It has been called the
"round O language," on account of each word being made up of a number of
small circles; and to an untrained eye the words seem almost exactly
alike. "The letters and words are all totally destitute of the least
resemblance to any language we have ever met with," Mr. Judson wrote to
a friend in Salem, "and these words are not fairly divided and
distinguished as in Western writing by breaks, and points, and capitals,
but run together in one continuous line, a sentence or paragraph seeming
to the eye but one long word; instead of clear characters on paper, we
find only obscure scratches on palm leaves, strung together and called a
book. We have no dictionary and no interpreter to explain a single word,
and must get something of the language before we can avail ourselves of
the assistance of a native teacher.... It unavoidably takes several
years to acquire such a language in order to converse and write
intelligibly on the truths of the Gospel."

Mr. and Mrs. Judson obtained a native teacher, and settled down to a
daily struggle with their task. The man was at first unwilling to have
Mrs. Judson as a pupil, thinking it below his dignity to instruct a
woman: but when he saw that she was determined to persevere he abandoned
his opposition. As the teacher knew no English and the pupils knew no
Burman, progress was of necessity very slow. "Our only mode of
ascertaining the names of objects which met our eye," wrote Mrs. Judson,
"was by pointing to them in the presence of our teacher, who would
immediately speak the names in Burman; we then expressed them as nearly
as possible by the Roman character, till we had sufficiently acquired
the power of the Burman."

In order to get more in contact with the people, they left Mr. Carey's
hospitable roof and took up their residence in the centre of the town.
This obliged Mrs. Judson to commence housekeeping on her own account,
and consequently she had less time to devote to study; yet to her
surprise she made faster progress now than she had ever done before. She
thus described her daily life, in a letter home: "We are busily employed
all day long. Could you look into a large open room, which we call a
verandah, you would see Mr. Judson bent over his table covered with
Burman books, with his teacher at his side, a venerable-looking man in
his sixtieth year, with a cloth wrapped round his middle and a
handkerchief on his head