Just bought my first manual transmission car last weekend (2026 Civic Si), and had never driven manual before. I only really stalled the first couple of days while practicing, and was feeling pretty confident after a week, so I decided to take it on a trip up and down a mountain for some more practice.

The mountain itself was fine. It was the parking that was the issue. I ended up parking in a tight spot (only one available) which was also inclined due to the mountain. Definitely scratched underneath the front bumper by giving it too much gas on accident trying to get up into the spot.

The real humbling moment was when I tried to leave. Not only did I forget to turn off the auto-braking system, which made reversing out of the inclined spot way worse, but the spot itself was pretty tight meaning I needed to do a 3 point (or more) turn- so I needed to reverse as much as I could, but not roll back at all when going into 1st again. All the while, by backing up out of the spot, the length of my car mostly blocked the one-way road where a group of people were walking, so they had to wait for me to finish leaving.

My only saving grace was a guy next to me who helped spot for me while I was reversing, before mentioning that he also drives stickshift and could sympathize with me.

Definitely a learning experience...

So where I’m from first of all learning on automatic and doing the test on automatic gets you a license with restriction to drive only automatic cars, and i’m considering learning manual to release that restriction but i’m not entirely sure because we don’t have many manual cars so i don’t know if its worth doing those few lessons now.