This paper reports results of a preliminary analysis of the errors made by Russian exchange students learning English at S.U.N.Y. in Albany. Error samples are taken from a taped panel discussion containing prepared and spontaneous speech, from a TOEFL test, and from a quiz. Errors are divided into intralingual, or those reflecting general characteristics of rule learning, and developmental, or those illustrating attempts to build hypotheses about English from limited knowledge. Most of the errors were of the intralingual type. An area of specific difficulty was the use of the article; this is shown to be due to a confusion about English syntax, rather than interference from Russian. Problems of interference from French and Spanish are also examined. The structural approach is suggested as a possible source of error, as well as the practice of having idioms memorized without attention to their syntactic contexts. (AM)