Linguistic Errors of Brazilian Students When Learning Russian as a Foreign Language (Basic Level)

Abstract

The article examines the errors in the basic level regarding the interference of the Portuguese language when Brazilian students learn Russian as a foreign language and offers the methodic to predict and avoid them. For this, authors compare the phonetic systems of Russian and Brazilian Portuguese as well as the main grammar units and structures that form the linguistic minimum on the basic level. Then, using the comparative analysis the errors in the students’ speech are predicted and interpreted. The results of theoretical comparison are compared to the actual and real errors. In the phonetic plan authors figure out significant difference in the signs of hardness, softness, place of articulation, mode of articulation and nasalization, and not big difference in acoustic signs and duration of sounds. In the grammatical field the results point out to a new and optimal order in teaching the cases. Also the necessity to adapt different grammar understanding of Russian verbal structure to the Brazilian one is described regarding the preposition and type of complement and the verb aspects. Authors developed exercises to help students overcome such errors more efficiently and in less time.

The Acquisition of Russian Grammar Cases by Brazilian Students

“…In this work the typological comparison points out to the potential problem of acquisition of grammar cases, when they differ the equivalent in Portuguese from the structure in Russian, e.g. a verb object is indirect in Russian and direct in Portuguese (Budnik, Medina & Medina, 2020).…”

The Potential of Dialect Phonetic Mistakes in Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language

“…Since the student's difficulties are determined in accordance to the peculiarities of his/her native language, especially in teaching phonetics, the mastering of phonetic material through texts will be realized precisely according to the similarities and differences of the native language in comparison with the foreign language. To teach RFL to Brazilian students, therefore, they have to consider their national phonetic difficulties when studying a foreign language, which has initially been described by Budnik (2007) and posteriorly explored by Medina (2020): a) violation of the softness feature can lead to a phonetic error based on substitution and, consequently, to the phonological replacement of soft consonants with hard ones due to the underdifferentiation of these phonemes;…”