The article is devoted to the studying gender at the lessons of Russian language. This paper examines the symbolic meaning of the word and reveals the concept of the word semantics relatively to inanimate nouns. To reveal the matter of the problem the words-concepts are used as an example. In the article the authors connect the essence of gender category with symbolic and semantic hypothesis of the ancient grammarians, according to which natural biological category "sexus" is correlated with grammatical category "genus". As a didactic material the authors present quotes from literary works, proverbs and sayings, which focus on the development of speech, enrichment of vocabulary and the formation of cultural competence of students. Having analyzed the structural and semantic principle of study of the category of gender in the Russian language by the example of culture lexemes, having studied the literature on research problem, having considered a learner as a linguistic personality, putting forward the lingvocultural approach to learning the Russian language as dominant, authors come to the conclusion, that the symbolic-semantic principle helps multifaceted language training
