Mwanamke anahamanika

Did I really think I could learn Swahili? Who are we kidding here?

I am recalling reading, somewhere, that (at least for English speakers) our brains process words based on their starting letter. I read a sample excerpt where, in every word on the page, the letters had been scrambled, which looked like code to me. But in another sample, they scrambled the words but left the initial letter of each word as the correct letter, and oddly, I could read it just fine - my brain I guess could interpret the words as long as they started right!

So I'm wondering if that's my Swahili problem. Because unlike all the European languages I've studied, in this one the word BEGINNINGS change with person, tense, gender, case, etc. Ack! So each time I encounter a given word, it looks completely foreign, and then I look it up in my handy online dictionary (kudos to the Kamusi project, btw) and discover for the nth time that, oh yes, I did learn that word actually, but this time it starts with ny- or an extra m- or a j- for no reason I can figure out yet.

I'm sure this will all become clear someday. Whether I'll have given up by then, though, I couldn't tell you.