GRANADA ADVENTURE Chronicle copy editor Niki Harris juxtaposes American and European life as she studies abroad

When the office previously known as the Study Abroad Office at the U changed its name to the Center for Learning Abroad last year, I thought it was ridiculous. I’ve never heard anyone refer to their semester in another country as “learning abroad,” only “studying abroad.” But from my own experience, I can tell you that the name change is vastly more appropriate.
As midterms are approaching for the Universidad de Granada, this is the first week that most of us have actually “studied” while abroad. But when it comes to learning, that’s something I’ve been doing every single day I’ve been here.
For example, I’ve been learning how to get really, really bad at English while getting really, really good at Spanish.
The more I speak Spanish to my host mom and my Spanish friends, the more my English words get muddled when I’m talking to my family and even to my friends in my program. I’ve started to forget English words, replacing them instead with their Spanish equivalents and expecting my mom, who speaks no Spanish, to understand me. It’s been hard to structure sentences in business emails directly after my Spanish grammar class, because I’m trying to force English words to conform to Spanish grammar rules.
But however bizarre this language roller coaster has been, it’s made me see how much more important learning is than studying. While my Spanish pronunciation and writing class is teaching me quite a bit, I’m learning more Spanish just by watching Pasapalabra (the most intense pass-the-vocabulary word game that exists) and striking up conversations with the owners of pastelerías.
The stark contrast between studying and learning was made evident earlier this week when I met with a Spanish–speaking student to help her with her English grammar. We went over phonetic pronunciations of all the English vowels and, as much as I tried to help her, she couldn’t understand why long o’s and short o’s were different, and why ‘would’ and ‘wood’ sounded the same. Finally, I stopped trying to explain in Spanish and reverted to English. I spoke slowly and clearly, pointing to the sounds on the page that I was saying, and repeating vowel sounds a couple times for emphasis.
And it clicked.
As soon as my friend stopped trying to study the words, she started to understand. She learned from the way I was speaking how to pronounce the words she’d struggled so much with in her English grammar book. It was eerily similar to the way that I’ve been learning Spanish — not through studying, but by experiencing.
This is learning: utterly mangling the language when trying to ask for directions on the street from little Spanish mamas doing their shopping; pointing at random objects in the kitchen and making up their meaning, only to have my host mom laugh at me and correct me gently; writing Spanish as best as I can with my program directors in an email or by chatting with friends from Sevilla on Facebook; or by looking up Spanish jokes and trying to understand the plays on words. Learning is eminently more valuable than mere studying.
Classes at the U just don’t offer learning anymore. What they offer is a study of the language, and if that is how you understand Spanish best, then great. But personally, the only way I can truly know Spanish is not by studying it but by experiencing it and learning it.