This study addresses the significant cross-linguistic challenges encountered when teaching medical terminology to students proficient in English, Russian, and Uzbek. The linguistic landscape is complicated by three key phenomena: direct lexical borrowings (primarily Latin/Greek), deceptive false cognates (or 'false friends'), and semantic misinterpretations caused by calques (loan translations). Analyzing comparative examples from the medical lexicons of these three structurally distinct languages—Germanic, Slavic, and Turkic—the paper investigates how these overlaps and divergences lead to confusion, semantic drift, and errors in clinical communication. The research utilizes corpus analysis and error data to map critical terminological traps. Findings provide foundational evidence for developing targeted, contrastive pedagogical strategies to differentiate misleading terms, thereby improving students' accurate acquisition and application of international medical vocabulary.

Medical Terminology, Cross-Linguistic, Contrastive Linguistics, Lexical Error Analysis, Semantic Drift, Borrowings, False Cognates, Calques, Pedagogical Strategies, Clinical Communication.

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