The present study examines French adult learners’ expressions of caused motion events in Chinese as a second language using the frameworks proposed by Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000). Productions are elicited by means of animated cartoons from 36 French learners of Chinese (24 intermediate, 12 advanced) as compared to 12 Chinese native speakers and 24 French native speakers. The participants’ productions are analyzed using three related measures: information focus (choice of information expressed), semantic density (amount of information expressed) and information locus (linguistic means used to express the information). Our results show (1) that intermediate level learners produce responses seemingly close to those produced by the French native speakers, and very different from Chinese native speakers: they have difficulties expressing multiple information within one grammatical sentence; (2) advanced learners move away from the source language patterns and show a clear progression towards the patterns of the target language, especially regarding information focus and semantic density; however, the linguistic means used by these advanced learners still differ from those of native Chinese speakers.