Marettimo, little island off Sicily

Watching and listening to Jamie mangle his way through the Italian language actually lifted our spirits enormously, because learning Italian when you only have access to books and CD's, and precious little exposure to native speakers makes learing the language very interesting. If anyone reading this post is also learning Italian and doesn't have access to native speakers or local language schools like us, please comment, maybe we can strike up a penpal relationship.

One of the aspects of learning Italian that we're struggled with is the gender of nouns, we know that we just have to learn them all, but it was interesting listening to Giovanni question Jamie about whether he was a bambino or bambina. Made us both realise that we need to pay more attention. On the other hand it was also refreshing to see everyone have a laugh about it rather than just get upset.

Our Hugo language course tells us that most nouns ending in -o are masculine, -a are feminine, but we're thinking we need to make up a list of common nouns to practice on because otherwise we just don't know if we'll catch on.

The people of Marettimo seemed genuinely interested in helping Jamie to communicate with them, and from what I hear this is also the case in Sardegna. Is it the same everywhere?