The article discusses the ways of borrowing foreign words in modern Russian and Chinese language, and the processes of their adoption in written speech of participants of Internet forums. This important linguistic problem was endowed with particular relevance in the conditions of the internetization of society, since it is on the Internet that new forms of mass communication arise and develop, communicate numerous social and age groups. The study identifies and compares differences in the ways of borrowing of foreign language vocabulary in Russian and Chinese. A comparative analysis of the studied lexical units showed that, in both Russian and Chinese modern speech, loanwords can develop new semantics by meaning extension, metaphorizing and metonimizing. It is noted that the formation of new meanings in the semantic structure of loanwords can be influenced by the contexts in which they are used. © 2020 Vestnik Novosibirskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, Seriya: Istoriya, Filologiya.