DIFFICULTIES IN CHINESE STUDENTS’ ACQUISITION OF RUSSIAN VERBS OF MOTION AND METHODOLOGICAL STRATEGIES FOR OVERCOMING THEM

Abstract

The article addresses a persistent problem in teaching Russian to Chinese students: the acquisition of the Russian system of verbs of motion, a grammatical category that has no direct structural analogue in Chinese. The study proceeds from a broader typological observation – Leonard Talmy’s distinction between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages – and narrows this observation to the specific mismatch between Russian prefixal-directional morphology and the Chinese system of directional and resultative verb complements. The theoretical basis includes classical Russian aspectology, methodological literature on teaching verbs of motion to foreign learners, and studies devoted specifically to errors made by Chinese students. Errors are classified into four groups: confusion of unidirectional and multidirectional verbs, confusion of prefixed and unprefixed forms, incorrect aspectual pairing after prefixation, and direct calquing of Chinese directional-complement structures onto Russian verb phrases. Each error type is illustrated with examples drawn from published pedagogical sources rather than from an original experimental corpus, a methodological choice the article discusses openly as a limitation. On this basis the article proposes methodological strategies, including a staged separation of directionality from prefixal semantics, explicit contrastive commentary keyed to specific error types, and exercise sequences addressing the persistent confusion between prefixed multidirectional and prefixed unidirectional forms. The proposed strategies are framed as a working model requiring classroom verification rather than as an already validated method.