REASONS FOR MISTAKES IN FOREIGN SPEECH PERCEPTION: BASED ON RUSSIAN AND CHINESE

Fluencyin a foreignlanguagepresupposesadvancementinvariousskills. When learning a foreign language, listening is one of the most difficult types of language practices for non-native speakers. The results of the present research based on the survey of 52 Chinese and 50 Russian L2 learners, aged 18-28 (Bachelor, Master and PhD levels) in Chelyabinsk support this viewpoint. The current paper analyzes the causes of mistakes in listening comprehension made by Chinese learners of Russian and Russian learners of Chinese. The causes can be of psychological nature (anxiety and the lack of motivation), of linguistic nature reflected on the phonetic (number of sounds, syllable tone vs lexical stress, connected speech processes), lexicographic, lexical-grammatical (the lack of vocabulary, differences of grammatical categories and syntactic sentence patterns) levels, as well as the lack of knowledge regarding cultural realities. These mistakes are a naturally expected as a result of the negative interference of the mother tongue.