However, it was not easy for them to learn the Yapese language. The only written material to be found consisted of a few government-regulation booklets and a Catholic catechism. The Watsons would listen to the people and try to imitate what they heard. By the following year, a young Yapese man who was showing interest in the truth also proved willing to give language lessons. The missionaries spent the first month trying to help him understand the English that they spoke so that he could tell them how to speak Yapese.

Yap has a language spoken nowhere else in the world,