The lexical skills development in the process of teaching Chinese as a foreign language to linguist students comes to the fore, since it is the volume of learned lexical items that most determines the development of occupational skills and competencies. The lexical skills development effectiveness is determined by the ability of students to correctly use lexical items in all language activities, which «significantly depends on correct lexical item meaning understanding» (Shen Heling, 2011). Understanding of a text in a foreign language also depends on understanding of the lexical item meaning. Today, the most commonly used method in Russia for explaining the Chinese lexical item meaning is the dictionary entry method, according to which a new lexical item is given hieroglyphically, with its phonetic sound pinyin and its meaning. But this approach does not take into account the Chinese languagepeculiarities, namely, the word formation peculiarities - the complex word meaning is made up and determined by the meaning of each hieroglyph forming it.