In the 2020/2021 academic year, due to objective circumstances caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Russian universities were forced to organize the admission of foreign citizens to preparatory departments exclusively in a distance format. This academic year turned out to be experimental and opened up many opportunities for both students and teachers. At the same time, taking into account the accumulated training experience, it can be concluded that when using an exclusively distance learning format, both advantages and significant disadvantages were identified, which, in turn, became a prerequisite for conducting the study. The purpose of this article is to identify and analyze in detail the main disadvantages of teaching types of speech activities in the online format and using remote learning platforms. The authors, as practicing teachers of Russian as a foreign language, directly faced all the problems considered in the article, and they observed the same difficulties among their colleagues. In this regard, the main methods for carrying out the work were methods characteristic of empirical research, first of all, observation, classification of results and generalization. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that for the first time an attempt was made to analyze the problems related to different areas of the organization and functioning of educational activities that arise in the distance learning process at the pre-university stage. This determines both theoretical and practical significance of the work carried out. As a result, the authors managed to summarize and systematize the disparate difficulties, which in the future may become the basis for finding systemic solutions to the identified problems.