This article discusses some words of foreign origin adopted into Polish and Russian from other languages. The lexical characteristic of borrowings has been selected for the analysis in order to show some similarities and differences in the scope of various lexical fields. For the purpose of this analysis two models of symmetric and asymmetric borrowing have been developed and tested. As a regular model have been classified those borrowings in which the quantity of meanings is equal, and those in which the quantity and scope of meanings are different in both languages under review as well as in relation to the source language. The most common problems and pitfalls of relevance to language learning have been identified, which mainly arise from the formal similarity of the adopted tokens.