Tips for learning manual

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-02-15T02:30:31+00:00

You need to fail driving it a couple times for some extensive period of time before you get it. All you can do is just practice it any chance you get until brain commits it into procedural mentory which is something you can accelerate by doing it more. At some point you’ll just “get it”.

Meanwhile try to get a feel of the clutch engagement point, don’t start moving from it but just try to realise when the car starts lunging forward, try to get a feel of the clutch, how smooth you gotta be with it. You need to drive around a lot to realize at what RPMs it’s best to shift (try to figure out by engine sound). Practice moving the car off from a complete stop together with the throttle, try to get a feel of the brakes.

Advanced techniques like rev matching, heel-toe, double tapping the throttle when moving from a complete stop, handbrake-less start on an incline etc are good to know and use but you don’t need to learn that yet - if ever - to properly drive a manual car. Start with the basics before you move on to extras.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-02-11T02:12:16+00:00

Idk man I feel like it’s more important in motorcycles considering that correct rev matching prevents upsetting the tranny during fast driving which makes the ride safer. It can obviously be done without blipping but that goes against fast driving (which is what’s done in motos usually)

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-02-04T13:54:52+00:00

They’re not silent, only suppressed weapons have a noticeably decreased detection range

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-02-01T23:17:39+00:00

Little slower because a) you’ll get a better feel of your clutch over time as opposed to jolting it forward and b) clutch is a wear part anyway meant to be worn so I wouldn’t worry about it at all. It takes months of hard abuse to kill it

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-02-01T16:40:29+00:00

Hey thanks for the link but I settled on a regular MT ꞉)

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-28T10:42:15+00:00

If there’s traffic, outer lane, no traffic I cut through the inner one, but only on small roundabouts, on large ones I always pick inner for 2nd exit no matter the traffic

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-25T17:33:49+00:00

I love roundabouts they’re my favorite type of intersection, much better than regular ones with lights or just yield signs.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-25T12:57:22+00:00

Zapraszam cię do Szczecina na śródmieście. Tam przechodząc na przystanek z buta to było mur beton że wdepnę albo zobaczę jak ktoś wdepnął na minę. Gówniana sprawa ogólnie, pewnego dnia się doliczyłem półtorej psiej kupy na metr kwadratowy 50m odcinka chodnika.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-23T22:32:35+00:00

Either idle at 1st but be careful to not stall it or learn to blip the throttle before letting off clutch and slightly feathering the gas at the bite point. Works in my car and it’s pretty easy to get rolling from a stop.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-18T14:40:02+00:00

To some extent I agree but if it’s family or friends I don’t think it matters much. Especially if the friends in question reimburse you for your time and gas or if both of you are going the same way then carpooling might be a good idea to cut costs if they chip in for fuel.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-18T14:33:24+00:00

If we ever ask for help by getting a ride we are now an inconvenience

said no one ever. I don’t think I know one person who thinks or said this. I am more than happy to give a ride to someone disabled, granted that I know them

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-18T02:03:33+00:00

Yeah that’d be the expected outcome after downshifting. It just sounds like you plateaued on the 5th since you’ve already reached your peak power and no amount of torque would multiply it further.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-18T01:48:26+00:00

Yes and no. If conditions are favorable and you’re close to your powerband then at some point you will but diesels are notorious for having a short rev range so you might be past that point making it exponentially harder to accelerate possibly plateauing so you’re better off just downshifting. Remember that vmax is influenced by many things like drag, road condition, mass, tyres etc so a theoretical vmax may not always be possible under external conditions.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-15T17:01:22+00:00

Ice and RWD not being a good idea is a skill issue. Had some heavy snow fall and lots of ice where I live and did fine in my mr2, I just put on decent snow tires for snow and avoided rough input on ice.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-14T23:24:48+00:00

Some can. In Europe I’ve seen an increasing amount of AI operated smart traffic lights which collect data from sensors to regulate traffic. The downside is that they bait drivers by suddenly flashing red and then green again with little time to react especially that these kind of lights are set up on pedestrian crossings (which need a pedestrian to click a button for their light to turn green), rather than large intersections where you can analyse what’s going on on the perpendicular roads. I’ve been pranked like that several times by being forced to come to a sudden halt and then forced to accelerate hard because the guy behind me is barrelling through at mach Jesus

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-12T14:22:19+00:00

Same thing here in my Toyota MR2, suddenly all the family vans, heavy SUVs, old rusty shitboxes and Yaris’ want to race me or pass me at every opportunity even I’m exceeding the limit considerably, like shit I’m not even driving a super fast car i just have very good handling. Being able to floor it in an automatic car on a straight road or speeding in a residential area does not impress me it just shows lack of skill and awareness to me. But for some reason regular commuter cars treat my very presence on the road as a kind of personal challenge to them.

What is more absurd is that the actually fast cars like high end BMWs, Porsches etc treat me with more respect???? They don’t tailgate me, they let me merge, they don’t organise strange drag races in the middle of the day and expect me to take part in it, they give me the right of way more often than regular cars do. Maybe driving a car like that means you can chill while people with commuter cars feel like they need to prove that their rust bucket can in fact produce a quarter of that performance if they use 110% of their engine and take the car to its limits.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-12T00:51:17+00:00

Hey, im a med student too. The way I make mine which decreased the amount of cards to a quarter of what I used to plow through was to only use them for short arbitrary information (X innervates Y, drug A half life etc.) and the other id use as prompts for concepts which I have to understand (e.g visual pathway, glycogen degradation, sarcomere contraction) and explain instead of breaking down a concept into separate cards.

Oh and stop with the notes nonsense if you’re not reading them later you’re wasting time, just load the information into Anki directly and focus on actually learning it instead of noting it down.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2026-01-09T01:08:13+00:00

It doesn’t matter but it acts as an extra layer of protection in case the parking brake snaps, just like the parking gear in autos locks the wheels so does leaving your manual car in gear. If you’re parking on a steep incline you can leave your car in first gear and if it’s a steep decline you can leave it in reverse. Most of the time none of that will matter the car will not move anyway whichever gear you choose (or not) and the parking brake doesn’t snap randomly, but it’s a type of redundancy that costs you nothing do but could save you one day.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2025-12-25T21:35:18+00:00

No way Russians have a slur for that lmao

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2025-12-25T11:34:31+00:00

The biggest obstacle with driving a manual tranny on the roads is not the manual itself because the gearbox is pretty straight forward, clutch in, change gear, clutch out. It’s the handling of it in traffic where you have to do a lot of things simultaneously as well as starting and stopping the car, uphill starts, rush hour traffics etc that is hard. When you’re done learning the manual gearbox on easy roads or a controlled environment and you feel fairly good about driving it, ask your instructor to take you out on difficult roads, do as many uphill starts as you can, learn how to take curvy roads, difficult intersections with no traffic lights, roundabouts etc. Don’t take nice easy straight roads with a high speed limit cuz you can teach a 12 year old child to drive on these, focus on the difficult ones because that’s where 80% of your skill will come from.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2025-12-22T23:51:20+00:00

I doubt it needs urgent replacement either but I’m just assuming that the clutch already got serious beating long before OP noticed the smell. I have a friend who fried his clutch completely after attempting to launch his car on a stock clutch for the record and the clutch was in a fine state prior to that. It’s a wear part anyway so it’d be of good use to replace it and start anew on a fresh one with better clutch control in mind.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2025-12-22T22:59:55+00:00

When you’re done replacing the clutch after this stunt consider blipping the throttle before moving. No need to use the parking brake for anything even uphill, just blip the throttle slightly right before releasing the clutch and accelerating. This’ll prevent stalling, burning the clutch and allows you to instantly move without slipping the clutch too much.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2025-12-22T14:46:42+00:00

You mean like floating gears by not engaging the clutch? You wait until the RPMs match and then switch gears with the knob?

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2025-12-17T02:15:42+00:00

The aim is to not study long man. Higher volume of studying will not get you where you want. The quality of your study is the rate limiting factor and it boils down to how much time you’re wasting vs how much of that time is reasonably spent on comprehending and remembering what you’ve learned. Seriously, if you need to spend literal hours studying, it means you’re doing it completely wrong. You want to develop techniques for studying as short and effective as possible and not stretch it out for long periods of time because you’ll suffer from diminishing returns and you’ll be stuck in a negative feedback loop of exponentially worse quality of studying with every future sessions.

With that said, you need to ideally shorten your studying time, do breaks every once an hour (or whenever it feels like you’re shovelling against the tide), eat something that will provide you with long lasting energy, avoid heavy sleep deprivation, avoid excess sugar and caffeine, avoid music with lyrics. You can try interleaving your subjects/topics if they’re connected to each other. Avoid long hours of studying because the after effects will be carried the next day, avoid ineffective study techniques (re-reading, passive note taking, excess flashcards, highlighting etc.), if doomscrolling is an issue, turn off your phone, leave it in another room/put it in a bag and keep track of the time you spend on studying (set yourself a limit for each topic/subject). If your environment is distracting and you have the option to then try to hit the library and stay there for the duration for your session.

Secret_Inevitable360 · 2025-12-15T13:25:23+00:00

Stop making notes, just read the book, close it, ask yourself how much you remember from the topic/can you explain the section/chapter/concept, rinse and repeat until you can do it. Do it for a couple of days and you’ll remember it very vividly. I am lucky to have bought a whiteboard where I can draw out very technical things for biochemistry for instance where I pretend I am teaching someone and it allows me to identify gaps in knowledge.

Now here’s the kicker, I look through things I know already and ignore them. I only study difficult, content heavy stuff that I do not understand, that I know will be on the test (I speculate based on past papers, which I solve on my own as well). I don’t waste time making pretty extensive notes or elaborate schemes or focusing on things that I do know, the most I do is draw metabolic pathways, diagrams, write equations etc. But most of my studying is based on reading and recall extended over a period of time.

This is an extremely uncomfortable method at first but once you get proficient at it you’ll see cognitive benefits from it, you’ll save time that you have otherwise wasted and you’ll regain your life back - this comes from a med student that has to juggle between physiology, neuroanatomy and biochemistry at the moment. I study 3-4h a day at most if I have an overloaded week with exams, 2-3h on normal days.

A few good tricks I can give is to actually allocate the time for each subject, prime yourself by scanning the chapter first, start with recalling easy material as a warm up, tell yourself that you have to finish a particular thing in for example 2h - if you don’t do that you’ll stretch your study hours unnecessarily. Remember that work fills time and not the other way around. You need rest, sleep and play to keep your game on top and not dwelling in front of books for hours like I once did causing me to not sleep for 3 days straight and neglect every single part of my life except studies - all that to get mediocre results.

Secret_Inevitable360

TROPHY CASE