You won't receive emails from your favorites... what you get is access to their NOTEBOOK posts that appear in your PERSONAL NEWSFEED. It's a place you go to checkout whata's going on with your peeps! If they post updates on their writing, you can see them there. AND adding them to your FAVORITES list will show when they've made a change in their PORTFOLIOs on the right-hand side of the WdC screen here. This is covered in the lessons.

Everything kind of builds. You start somewhere, you learn, you find more information that makes little sense, then you go learn about that. But I realized I didn't answer your question. Plus, Schnujo and I think the main difference between Fanning & Favoriting is mostly from the POV: YOU are a FAN of someone else, and you have your OWN fans; Favorites means THEY are YOUR faves, and marking them as such will allow them to show up in your Newsfeed, and the Favorites LISTING which is no different really than a browser's bookmarking feature.

Things can also be a bit different for devices, so let me know (if you want to) if you mostly use a PC or Apple, Android, etc.