The way I've always interpreted it when used in class is "I may not fully understand or be able to to do what you ask but I will try my hardest nonetheless".
Holy had it right at the start. But its beyond MA. When I lived in Japan I also played Rugby against the local teams and they would use it at the end of the match when shaking hands, macho thing in general.
So "osu" in the Koryu arts would be offensive? What would be a more approriate word? Hai? Or just use English?
I personally I don't use it, but then again don't get offended when I hear it now and then. It’s when its "Osu!" after this and "Osu!" before that every other bleedin word is "Osu!" it gets on my pip!. I don’t know why but when I hear Osuing to excess, I always think of Blackadder and the dangers of Pooh Poohing a Pooh Pooh… You know, if there's one thing I've learnt from being in the Army, it's never ignore a pooh-pooh. I knew a Major, who got pooh-poohed, made the mistake of ignoring the pooh-pooh. He pooh-poohed it! Fatal error! 'Cos it turned out all along that the soldier who pooh-poohed him had been pooh-poohing a lot of other officers who pooh-poohed their pooh-poohs. In the end, we had to disband the regiment. Morale totally destroyed... by pooh-pooh!
Thanks everyone, it clears a lot of things up. I had seen that fighting chicken article references before but all the links to it were dead so I couldn't access it until one of you kindly folk linked to it above. The reason I asked is I have noticed it being used more often and not in ways I thought really where that appropriate. I noticed it's also now a brandname (Oss clothing or something) which caught me as odd, but it sounds like I should just not care unless I actually go to Japan and want to avoid making a fool of myself. Actually I just looked up the website for that clothing company, and they state they are using one translation of "oss" from the Japanese characters. So it's a bit different in this case. Thanks again.
'Osu' is the proper pronunciation. That's the great thing about Japanese, very easy pronunciation. It just bothers me when Japanese words are transliterated wrong. It kills me every time someone writes 'Tokyo' - It's 'Tōkyō' goddammit!
The su is heavily truncated at the end of words, but it is still there. It is not correct to just pronounce it as a hard ess sound. Of course most non-native speakers needn't worry about that level of subtlety, but 'oss' is an incorrect transliteration either way. It would be like cutting the 'h' off the front of English words because southerners (English) never learned how to speak proper. Some Japanese regional accents make it clearer than others. I think the Kansai dialect is particularly prone to this, but I haven't been able to find a clear example.
"Osu" always felt weird for me because when I first started with Aikido, I started with "hai". It was a habit that stuck and my new sensei doesn't seem to mind I say "hai" instead of "osu". I always knew why people used it, but it just felt weird still. Having read this thread and the linked posts, I think I'll stick with "hai".
I've never heard this used in a GBK dojo, in fact I've only ever heard this uttered by western karate practitioners, or western gendai budo practitioners, usually in the yes I understand context. I'll personally stick with Hai Sensei, or hai wakarimashita..
+1. But I know it is used in modern jujutsu quite often. With 99% of the people having no clue what any of the Japanese words mean, why they are saying them or why their pronunciation is as awful as nails on a chalkboard.
Not that I disagree with you, but many keyboards don't make it easy to write anything other than the normal a-z alphabet. French is another language with this problem unless you use a French keyboard layout of course. So when I am typing something in French (luckily very rarely) I just forego the accent symbols because whoever is reading it -knows- what I mean.
