Difficulties Faced in the Learning of Russian as a Foreign Language: Grammatical Gender Category


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DALKILIÇ L. Ç.

SELCUK UNIVERSITESI EDEBIYAT FAKULTESI DERGISI-SELCUK UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF FACULTY OF LETTERS, cilt.38, ss.279-298, 2017 (ESCI) identifier

Özet

The Russian and Turkish languages belong to different linguistic families. When we compare both languages, their differences show themselves in many constructs of language. One of these differences is the formal expression of words. The Russian language has the category of gender which separates words into classes and requires a relationship of harmony among words that are used together. On the contrary, the Turkish language does not have grammatical gender. The gender category, which acts as a grammatical category in Russian, affects all parts of the language, especially number, adjectives, and pronoun conjugations. In addition, it presents a challenge for Turkish students who learn Russian as a foreign language, because of the fact that this category has various means of expression in the Russian language and possesses a lot of exceptional uses apart from the given general uses. The gender linguistic features of Russian and the difficulties in the acquisition of this category which exists as a separate category in the language are discussed in this study. In order to demonstrate the difficulties of language acquisition, how the category of gender shows itself in Russian and Turkish as well as the similarities and differences between languages on this subject are discussed. In this context it is shown how this category in Russian is expressed with morphological, syntactic, lexical-semantic and lexical-word derivation methods. Further, the difficulties in the process of putting up the gender of words in Russian, which has three genuses (masculine, feminine and neuter), are mentioned, with examples.