The high recognizability of the precedent names among the native speakers of a particular linguistic culture has led to the relevance of studying these linguistic units in the aspect of foreign language teaching, where considerable attention is paid to the formation of linguistic-cultural competence. The aim of the work is to study the peculiarities of precedent name perception in the Russian language discourse by humanitarian foreign students. The materials of the research included adapted and original texts, Internet memes with precedent names. The subject of analysis was precedent names from literary works and movies. The nature of the material under study necessitated the use of the continuous sampling method. Twenty-seven precedent names from fiction and journalistic texts, from Internet memes were used. Further processing of the obtained results was carried out with the help of descriptive, contextual and semantic analyses. A total of seven tasks were offered to recognize precedent names in fiction, journalistic and educational texts and to correlate the precedent names with their characteristics and sources. It was proved that the indicator of the attractiveness of precedent names in Russian language teaching is the interest of foreigners in characters that are highly recognizable by native speakers, the reference to sources significant for native speakers, and the possibility to correlate them with the precedents from their native linguistic culture. The authors describe the specifics of selecting significant precedents for native speakers of a particular linguistic culture and suggest compiling a linguistic-cultural commentary on the language units studied, considering the realities of the country of the language under study. Moreover, the high interest of foreign students to the memes containing precedents shows the research perspective in terms of defining the principles of selecting the precedents and developing appropriate methodological recommendations.