I personally found it to be a great help when I transitioned from SH2, I was used to manually plotting ship courses from periscope readings. I actually had sheets of paper, a protractor and pencil and would mark down the periscope readings every 2 minutes to get a solution on a long shot, i.e. 3km or more.
You will find that it's very much similar in Sub Command or Dangerous Waters.
DW makes it very easy in fact, because you get a 'stack the dots' line that is not available in real life or in SH2/3. Basically you just have to play around with the arrow at the end of the line.. Stretch it out or move it to any direction on the compass.. Try doing that and alternating between show truth on and off. Check to see the positioning between your solution and the show truth map.
Another good indicator for manual TMA is to watch the bearing of a contact on your sensors. If it's a sonar contact, watch to see if your contact is sliding off to the north or south. Make occasional 20-30 degree turns to make it even easier to determine a ship's course. If you are feeling courageous, come up to periscope depth and raise the ESM mast and take some readings, or even pop the scope up and get a visual on your target.
After about a week of just playing around with it and observing autoTMA you will have a good enough grasp to use it just fine.
That being said, I personally just leave autoTMA on as I find it to be a hassle to always do it manually. But it is very important to be able to TMA manually, because autotma is slow and is not always accurate. Also it can not do things like deliberately put a contact in the wrong spot to make firing torpedos or rockets easier (For example if you wanted to shoot a torpedo at the area you think a ship will flee to when he hears your torpedo. The only other way to do that is with a snapshot which is not as accurate, especially with non-wire guided torps like in the Kilo)
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