Mastering Kinyarwanda - am I dreaming???!

I started learning Kinyarwanda in Sydney, Australia with a Rwandan teacher in April 2009 and travelled to Rwanda in July 2009. I am a language teacher and have learned - and more or less mastered - a couple of other languages over the years, so I have the basic 'mechanics' of language learning under my belt, but Kinyarwanda is proving very very tricky - and frustrating.

What I have been able to assemble so far is the set of Kinyarwanda lessons by Betty Cox which I THINK actually date from the 1950s?? and which have been scanned and uploaded online. I have also bought a couple of books written in French by Overdulve/Jacob and Gasarabwe which seem to give some sound grammar rules but which are VERY theoretical and very far removed from the practical interactive approach generally followed in contemporary language teaching.

But the most frustrating of all is the fact that it is EXTREMELY difficult to use a dictionary to look up new words because of the way the language is constructed. The first few letters of a word constitute the 'prefix' which, in the case of nouns, changes according to class and singular/plural. Because the prefix changes, the words are listed in the dictionaries I have found not by their initial letter, but according to the letter of the main part (root? /radical?) of the word e.g. umuhungu (boy) is listed under 'h' for hungu because 'umu' is the prefix of the 1st class indicating singular (the plural is 'abahungu'). In THEORY this seems not too hard to get the hang of, but my regular experience is that I am only finding 30% - on a good day! :) - of new words that I come across in documents from the net, despite my best efforts to guess what the main part of the word could be!!

BUT anyway, after a rather extended break over Christmas/New Year/Aussie summer I will be starting to revise or rather revive what I have already learned before resuming lessons.

I would be VERY happy to hear of anyone else's attempts to learn Kinyarwanda and any tips you may have - or advice from native speakers. Murakoze cyane!!