The research goal is to reveal and classify pauses of hesitation in spontaneous speech of Japanese students in their second (Russian) language compared to speech in their native (Japanese) language. The dependence of hesitation pauses on the language and the type of communicative task is revealed. The research material included 20 recordings of spontaneous oral speech of five Japanese native speakers with the running length of approximately 4 hours 20 minutes. The results proved the hypothesis that hesitation pauses are more common for speech in the second language as compared to the native one; the correlation of hesitation pauses to the text type has not been found.