Yep! In my experience it’s awful and it stays awful for ever.

But just like with going to work, over time you come to accept that existence is suffering.

It becomes easy with practice, and driving a manual is not distracting at all once you get the hang of it

It really depends. You need to train yourself to focus on the important stuff and let the rest become second nature.

Driving a manual car usually doesn’t take conscious effort to do, you just… drive. But that takes practice. Lots of it.

And some people just never get there. Or they are afraid to drive, which tends to provoke dangerous situations. Or they can drive okay but don’t pay enough attention to the road.

But usually driving with an instructor is stressful, once you get your license everything will be more relaxed and easier.

I was very daunted by driving when I started, especially when I had to drive a really old clunky low-power diesel Mercedes with my overly critical dad and big brother yelling at me.

Didn’t take long for it to become second nature, and I actually drove taxis for several years.

It literally just takes a while for your brain to get accustomed to everything. Yes, youre right in that a manual can be a distraction from learning traffic, but it really doesn’t take long for the shifting to become very natural, and then you can pay attention to the traffic.

As for actual tips on the clutch, it’s not really as much a matter of millimeters, as it is about the balance between throttle and clutch. Don’t be afraid to give it a bit more gas to makeita sure you won’t stop the car even if you let go of the clutch slower. Yes it will sound a bit like a student driver, revving the car “needlessly”, but you are a student driver and it isn’t needless revving, because you’re still learning the feel for the clutch.

It also depend a lot on the make and model of the car the school has. It’s a bit of a personal preference, but clutches are really different in different cars. You might really like a 90’s Mercedes with a reeaally long clutch, but that too takes getting a bit used to. I remember the cars my car school had were fairly new Ford’s, and they had really short clutches. Annoyed me as well.

Honestly took me less than a year of driving and I knew how to shift without a clutch. Some really old 70’s sand lorries my dad used to drive didn’t have clutches, so he taught me how to (in some cars it works some don’t really like it, but basically you could do it in all manual cars, without damaging the gearbox if you do it properly); when accelerating, just as you let go of the throttle, like 0.5sec after that there’s a short period where you can just pull the gear to neutral without any resistance. That’s easy. Shifting into gear from neutral without clutch isn’t as easy, but in some cars, not much of a challenge. You need to rev the engine to match the rpm, but like with a short press of the gas pedal, which revs the rpm higher than it needs to, then when the rpm is coming down there’s a window where you can shift into gear really easily.

I ramble, you don’t need to thin about that.

I would suggest, if possible (idk if you have a learners permit or smth and can drive under parent supervision), to practice driving on highways and country roads for less traffic to learn the car better. If not, maybe ask your teacher on the next lesson if you could do that.

And if not, if you have to drive in the city, the most important is just to remember that the panic and rudeness you feel isn’t something which should make you hurry. People will be annoyed, but you have a right to annoy them, as you’re learning. It’s a shit thing, being a learning driver, but once you get your licence and get to take the car on a long drive yourself on some chill roads, you might actually enjoy the driving because the stress won’t be there. And then learning will become easier as well, when your heart isn’t beating through your chest with someone watching over you.

Just keep at it. You know what to do. Now it’s just a bit of repetition.

Edit oh and ask anything if you like, 3rd gen taxi driver, drove since 2007 (not driving currently). No stupid questions exist. So anything at all, go ahead.

Manual transmissions are operated almost entirely by “feel”. Once that sinks in, it’s a lot easier.

If you can, go find a quiet street, parking lot, or any place with an incline. Practice stopping in the middle of the incline and taking off without stalling. Don’t stress out when you inevitably stall. You will and that’s ok. If you can master starting on a hill, you’ll find that the rest of it comes a lot easier.

With the transmision in 1st and your foot on the brake, release the clutch very slowly until the engine starts dragging just a little. Slowly take your foot off the brake. You’ll know the clutch is in the right spot if it keeps you from rolling backwards. At that point, start to accelerate and let the clutch out slowly. Continue to accelerate and up the hill you go.

Don’t hesitate to hit the brakes at any time if you feel like you’re going to roll backwards. Better to stall than to roll back into someone behind you. Depending on the gearing, you may be able to start in 2nd and that will keep you from having to worry about shifting in the middle of the hill.

Don’t panic. Learning is good. If someone gets upset with you because you’re inexperienced and stall out then screw them. They should try to remember what it was like to learn how to drive. It just takes practice, practice, and more practice.

When I first started driving, it was with manual. And it really helped once I realized two things:

• Being shitty at gear shifts won’t make me fail at the final test. Instructor told me as much. If I wear out the clutch and cox up the engine through repeated stalls, that’s my problem - I can torture and destroy my car through ineptitude, as long as it’s done in accordance with road safety.
• Getting used to the clutch is half the battle. Not clutches in general, but the specific one you’re driving. Once you get used to know how insensitive or sensitive it is, the rest will be a lot easier. With time (and not a whole lot of it, actually), you’ll be shifting gear without having to think much about it, just like the rest; right now you’re struggling with you many areas that require your focus. As you practice them, you will do all of them without thinking about them.

I still need a while getting used to new gearboxes whenever I’m using someone else’s car.

Oh, and a tip: be sure to memorize the gear positions, and while standing still with the engine off you can practice shifting from and to any gear without looking. That’s one less thing to pay attention to.

I’ve been driving for well over a decade, nearing two. I hate every minute of it. Honestly, I hate other drivers more than driving itself. Trust no one, assume everyone is out to kill you because half of them are.

I hate driving, it’s stressful to be operating heavy machinery with the capacity to kill. That said, driving a manual car is much worse, just adds a lot of stress on top

No, it’s not awful all the time. Cruising down a highway or familiar streets can be kind of zen. I say this as someone who despises car-culture and believes most transit should be mass, public, transit options like buses and trains. But I have fond memories of cruising down the highway at night by myself singing along with my favorite music.

I live somewhere that’s walkable and has a subway system now, and it’s much better. Don’t have to worry about parking, insurance, fuel, drinking too much. So if you really hate driving, you could look into living somewhere that doesn’t require it.

It gets easier with practice, I don’t know about where you live but in Portugal to get your license you can only learn manual and you have to do 40 32 hours of driving lessons before the exam. By the end of the lessons it becomes second nature. We practiced a lot starting and parking in steep climbs and even rolling starting the car as if the battery was dead. But this was my experience, it changes from school to school.

Since here the majority of cars are still manual, I believe we should learn them because its much easier to move to automatic than the other way around.

Where do you live that you HAVE to learn manual? Here in Germany you have a choice of either learning manual or automatic. If you learn automatic though you are only allowed to drive automatic cars and if you learn manual you are allowed to drive both.

“Are cars always this awful” you ask, whilst shitting on the alternative…

And I hate automatic. After a few weeks or months, you won’t even realize there’s a clutch or shift. It’s actually easier, as with automatics I have to actually look at it to determine which gear I am in, eg. reverse or drive.

I really hated learning how to drive, because I’m good at learning things in a knowledge type way, but that was little help with learning how to drive. I’m not very good at being not very good at things, which sounds like a humble brag, but it actually means I get frustrated and find it hard to stick with things I don’t immediately click with.

It took me a decent while before driving began to feel more natural, but it did get easier; one of the changes I noticed as I improved was I gradually came to treat the mirrors as an extension of my visual perception rather than things I needed to remind myself to check (this also meant I preferred reversing for tight manoeuvres, because the mirrors meant I could better gauge my “vehicular proprioception”, so to speak (how close I was to other stuff))

None of this will make your quest any easier, because the process does take time and it sucks for the majority of that. However, I hope you take some comfort in knowing that this certainly isn’t a you-problem.

Hard to say without knowing details. How’s the traffic in your area, is it a big city or more rural? What country?