TYPOLOGY OF ERRORS IN THE WRITTEN SPEECH MADE BY RUSSIAN-SPEAKING STUDENTS WHILE TEACHING CHINESE LANGUAGE: FREQUENCY ANALYSIS AND METHODOLOGICAL RECOMMENDATIONS

Abstract

The article presents an empirical study of errors made by Russian-speaking students at the
initial stage of learning Chinese. It’s a period critically important for establishing stable grammatical and
syntactic skills. The relevance of this research is driven by the growing global interest in Chinese amid
increasing Russian-Chinese collaboration and internationalization. The study is based on a corpus of 30
written texts on the topic «About Myself», totaling approximately 4,000 Chinese characters, produced by
students with no prior experience in Chinese. Particular attention is given to developing a tailored error
typology comprising four main classes: interferential errors (caused by transfer from Russian or other foreign
languages), near-systemic errors (stemming from incomplete acquisition of rules), extra-systemic errors
(falling outside the learned linguistic system), and textual errors (disrupting coherence and discourse logic).
Each class is further refined into subclasses and specific error types. A frequency analysis enabled the
distinction between symptomatic (recurrent, systematic) and episodic (occasional, sporadic) errors. These
findings informed practical methodological recommendations aimed at enhancing students’ linguistic
competence, fostering metalinguistic awareness, and improving teaching materials and instructional
strategies. The conclusion outlines directions for future research, including corpus expansion and
comparative studies with speakers of other native languages.