No shade to your parents, but they were teaching you wrong. It only takes a few hours of good instruction to properly drive a stick, and it’s not about timing, it’s about clutch feel.
You start by sitting on your right foot (like half Indian style) so that only your left foot can work the controls. Push in the clutch and find 1st. Let out the clutch until you feel it just start to grab and the car starts to move forward. Clutch back in a bit to keep from stalling, then back out until you are idling forward in 1st. You are gonna stall the engine A LOT here. This is the most important foundational skill. Keep practicing until you can start the car moving with the clutch alone. Then, using both legs now, add a bit of gas and shift to 2nd, then back to a stop. Should be a small addition to what you now know.
Next, we learn to reverse. Hold the engine from neutral at 800 to 1200 rpm (don’t rev the nuts off it) and let the clutch out to the friction point again. The clutch is like an inverted gas pedal in an automatic. Push the clutch pedal in to slow down, let it out to speed up.
All that’s left after that is figuring out starting uphill. You are going to stall it a few times, but in two weeks of driving a manual, you’ll be good at it. Only thing from here is double clutching, which doesn’t buy you much since syncros were added to transmissions.
My parents tried to teach me how to use a manual transmission, but I simply could not get the timing down no matter how much I practiced.
No shade to your parents, but they were teaching you wrong. It only takes a few hours of good instruction to properly drive a stick, and it’s not about timing, it’s about clutch feel.
You start by sitting on your right foot (like half Indian style) so that only your left foot can work the controls. Push in the clutch and find 1st. Let out the clutch until you feel it just start to grab and the car starts to move forward. Clutch back in a bit to keep from stalling, then back out until you are idling forward in 1st. You are gonna stall the engine A LOT here. This is the most important foundational skill. Keep practicing until you can start the car moving with the clutch alone. Then, using both legs now, add a bit of gas and shift to 2nd, then back to a stop. Should be a small addition to what you now know.
Next, we learn to reverse. Hold the engine from neutral at 800 to 1200 rpm (don’t rev the nuts off it) and let the clutch out to the friction point again. The clutch is like an inverted gas pedal in an automatic. Push the clutch pedal in to slow down, let it out to speed up.
All that’s left after that is figuring out starting uphill. You are going to stall it a few times, but in two weeks of driving a manual, you’ll be good at it. Only thing from here is double clutching, which doesn’t buy you much since syncros were added to transmissions.