So, I decided to give Spanish a real go a couple years back. You know, apps, some cheap online classes, the usual stuff. I had this plan to travel around South America, figured knowing the language would be kinda important.
Anyway, one evening I was watching this movie, I think it was from Argentina. Pretty good drama. The characters are talking back and forth, and then suddenly one of the main guys stops mid-sentence, gets this look on his face, and says something like, “Wow, qué déjà vu.”
That totally caught me off guard. I stopped the movie. Déjà vu? Isn’t that French? Like, everybody knows that phrase is French. Why was this dude saying it right in the middle of a Spanish conversation? It just sounded… odd to me. Felt out of place.
Getting to the bottom of it
My first step was asking my online Spanish tutor during our next session. I brought it up, like, “Hey, is this a thing? Using ‘déjà vu’ in Spanish?” She just chuckled a bit and basically said, “Yeah, of course, we use it all the time. It’s just… déjà vu.” That wasn’t the deep explanation I was hoping for, but it did tell me it wasn’t just some weird thing in that one movie.
So, like anyone else, I jumped online. Didn’t just look for translations, but more like forums and articles about everyday Spanish. And yeah, loads of results popped up saying Spanish speakers totally use “déjà vu”. Apparently, it’s one of those words, like ‘hobby’ or ’email’ in English, that just got borrowed directly from French because it perfectly captures that specific feeling. No need to invent a new Spanish phrase when the French one works so well, I guess.
It really got me thinking about languages and how they borrow stuff, especially for feelings or concepts that are hard to pin down. That weird brain-fart moment where you feel like you’ve stepped into a scene you already lived. Seems like it’s universal enough that the French term stuck in quite a few places.
Then the weird part happened…
Okay, so maybe a week or two after I went down this rabbit hole about “déjà vu en espanol”, something genuinely strange happened. I was doing a language exchange call with a woman from Colombia. We were just having a normal chat, talking about food, I think specifically about arepas. Standard practice conversation.
And then bam! I got hit by this incredibly intense wave of déjà vu. It was overwhelming. For a split second, I was absolutely convinced, like 100% sure, that I had lived through this exact moment before. Not just a similar chat, but this exact one.
- The way the sunlight was hitting my desk.
- The specific way she paused after saying ‘delicioso’.
- Even the dumb joke I was about to make.
It probably only lasted a couple of seconds, but it felt way longer. It was so strong it actually kinda spooked me. When the feeling passed, the first thought in my head was seriously, “¡Qué déjà vu!” I almost said it out loud to her! Managed to stop myself, felt a bit weird about it.
But that moment kinda clicked everything into place for me. My little investigation into “déjà vu en espanol” wasn’t really about mastering a foreign phrase. It was just about understanding that some human experiences, some weird feelings, cross borders and languages. And sometimes, you dig into something small like why people say a French phrase in Spanish, and you end up experiencing the very thing yourself in a really vivid way. Life works in odd ways, doesn’t it?
So, yeah. They definitely say déjà vu in Spanish. Just like that, plain and simple. And after getting sucker-punched by that feeling myself right in the middle of my Spanish practice? It makes perfect sense now. It’s just a feeling we all know, no matter the language.
