I am also slightly unsure about what the dash does there concerning the nuance, but 目の前(めのまえ) is also a set expression in general.
I think it’s this grammar point and in this sentence it would mean “no matter how lanky they are” .
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Just a note that the kanji「一」is unlikely to change it’s direction from horizontal to vertical.
Usually when you have a vertical dash, it’s the katakana vowel extender to make a sound longer (this symbol will be vertical with vertical text and horizontal with horizontal text). I’m not certain that that’s what it’s being used for here, but in manga you frequently see a vertical dash signaling the end of a thought and/or the beginning of a new one.
Someone with more knowledge about this please feel free to chime in!
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I did not even pay attention that it was vertical, as I did not encounter it in the beginning of a sentence yet. Thanks for the clarification, makes sense now
Yeah I was about to ask if anybody else has problems reading the kanji in the physical version. I either just found out that I need reading glasses or I need some really bright lightbulbs in my room 
Wait til you get to bolded 10+ stroke kanji in even smaller font! I’ve just been taking pictures and zooming in.
yeah it’s definitely not just you! I don’t think I need glasses and even so it’s really hard to read some of the furigana! Especially telling the difference between eg か and が etc
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Ah thanks so much, the explanation you’ve linked is really helpful 
As expected, this is a tough read for me. BUT I’ve made it to page 20 so far and mostly understood (with a lot of help from the vocab list!).
There were a few bits where I didn’t quite grasp the grammar, but I’m managing to understand roughy what is being said and I think that’s good enough for now?
It definitely feels more like I’m “decoding” than reading at the moment, so I’m excited to see how much my reading ability improves by the end of the book!
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Absolutely feel free to ask grammar questions on here. There’s likely to be someone who can explain it well, or point you in the right direction, and you might learn about nuances that you didn’t pick up on before!
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This is my first book club, so I hope I’m doing this right! I have a grammar question.
On page 12, 泉 says:
「俺達一足先に大会終わっちゃったしね」
I understand what 一足先 and 大会 are referring to in this context, but where I’m getting tripped up is the 終わっちゃたし part. I know 終わる means “to end,” and し is the reason particle, but I don’t know why he’s using the ～ちゃう～ conjugation in this context or what し is being used for.
This exactly sums up my experience just now as well! I wish you luck
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It’s this grammar form: てしまいます Have a look at meaning #2.
ちゃった or っちゃった are very shortened forms of the grammar construction てしまう/てしまいます, which means “unfortunately/regretfully (verb)”.
So here it goes from:
終わってしまいます > 終わってしまう > 終わっちゃった by degrees of informality.
Now that I see the context, I agree that てしまう is for something to be completely over/to have finished something entirely.
「終わっちゃったし」
You’re correct that 終わる means to end. There’s a grammar construct where you combine the て-form of a verb with the verb しまう (and conjugate as desired). Together, this construct means to finish [the verb] completely, to do [the verb] by accident, unfortunately, etc. You can see more examples about it here if you’d like. ちゃう is the contracted form to てしまう - so what we do here is drop the て at the end of the て-form, add ちゃう, and conjugate as necessary. Combining that with 終わる, we have 終わっちゃう, which would (probably) mean to completely finish/end. Combined with the previous part of the sentence, we can see that he’s trying to say "our (basketball and soccer) tournaments completely ended before (yours).
Note that arguments could be made for the other meanings of てしまう, but I personally feel like the “to do something completely/to finish something” fits best here.
The し is there to give a reason as you noted. Right before, Hinata had just thanked Izumi and Kouji for coming with him. Kouji told him to stop because he’s feeling embarrased, and Izumi gives the reason they managed to come along.
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Already confused about the first line!
３度のボレーで攻撃へとつなぐ球技である
‘It is a ball game that connects into an attack with three volleys.’ Is there any grammar point I am missing, or is it just this vague of a sentence? I feel like I am missing an object?
I’m gonna take a crack at translating this, but it probably won’t sound very nice. Here we go!
「３度のボレーで攻撃へと " 繋ぐ " 球技である」
The first part, 「３度のボレー」is just saying a volley of 3 hits. The で that follows in this context means “by way of”.
Next, there’s 攻撃へと " 繋ぐ ". 攻撃 means attack or assault, and the へ particle adds a sense of direction or destination. In other words, something like “(heading towards) attacking”.
(I’ll come back to the と particle in a moment).
繋ぐ means to connect or to link, but there doesn’t seem to many context clues as to what it means to connect. I think this is left vague on purpose. As you read along in 「ハイキュー」 you’ll see this word pop up many times, and the author ends up defining it for you. However, that’s many pages away, so for now we’ll just take this to mean a general, vague connection.
Now, the と particle here is interesting. と tends to have many different meanings, but I think here と is being used as a conditional. According to Tae Kim, と is the natural consequence particle - i.e. ＸとＹmeans if or when X is done, then Y will certainly happen. Both 攻撃へ and 繋ぐ are kind of vague, but putting it together with the と, we can get a sense of the meaning: “if (moving toward) an attack, will connect”. The connection/linkage will happen when trying to “attack”.
There’s a second way the と particle can be used with nouns. In that case, it contains the meaning “with”. For example, 「犬と走っている」. If we use this meaning of と with the 攻撃へ and 繋ぐ, we get a sense of “with the purpose of/heading towards attacking, connect”. I don’t know enough Japanese to be able to tell which use of と is being used for certain here, but hopefully this gave you some idea as to what the author is trying to say. Imabi goes into the different uses of と in a bit more detail.
Finally, we have the 球技である. である is apparently used in formal/literary situations to state that something is so in an authoritative, neutral manner. 球技 refers to ball games, so this is just saying that “this is a ball game (where) ___”. From the first part of the sentence we can fill in the blank. Now, there might be a few different ways to translate this to English, but I don’t get the sense there’s an exact or direct translation. Instead, I’ll just try to convey the idea - “this is a ball game where you have three touches to volley so you can connect and (try to) attack”.
(See how I just introduced a bunch of words that didn’t exist originally there?)
By the way, I think you’re right. I also want some sort of connecting particle to go between 繋ぐ and 球技, though any particle filling in will be retroactive. Things like は and が seem to work well enough without very strongly changing the meaning.
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that was a fairly long first week for the bbc… the chapter felt like the hinomaru sumo of volleyball except you do sumo alone
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This is just the second manga I’m reading but wow, much harder (simply due to sheer amount of vocab) than I expected. Glad to know that it isn’t always like this.
Thanks for going through this in detail @BarelyFragile! This panel took me ages to try to figure out and you’ve made sense of a few things that I wasn’t sure of
I feel like this might be just me reading into it from the artwork/the amount they do this in the anime but I assumed that it was meant to be kind of disjointed as a stylistic choice as I was assuming this was the inner monologue of the player we see diving for the ball. So things like 繋ぐ being on its own I read as being like the player diving towards the ball being like “connect!”, just trying to get a touch to keep it in play.
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This is a good point. The anime does do this a lot, and I don’t know how much that’s copying the way things are written in the manga vs. just stylistic choices the anime made. Either way, I think there’s some coherence to how the thoughts can be joined together.
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