While the semantic space has been examined as a way to computationally represent language meaning-grammar interface, minimal research has been done comparing the semantic spaces of first and second language learners. We investigated the semantic space of university-level students learning French by extracting semantic features from narrative text over various time points from a 21-month period. After using machine learning models to classify native speakers’ semantic features from second language learners’, we used interpretability techniques to identify the most informative features per model. Through this, we discovered a variety of embedding similarity features to be decisive in language learning. We compared both groups to determine how the features differed per group and if there was any change over time. The findings demonstrated that the second language learners on average had higher semantic similarity scores than the native speakers at the token level. The similarity decreased over time but did not reach native-level values. Similarly, average surprisal was higher in the second language learner group, which steadily decreased over the course of the data collection period. These results provide insight into personalized education with more precise and effective computational indices tracking learners’ progress.