I’m also currently learning to swim. Backstroke really is the easiest as far as you don’t concentrate on your “stroke” as getting the damn thing right is rather difficult (well, I can’t really do it). The crawl is not that bad, but hard. And it took me 6 months to be able to swim 50m.

What you need to do is: keep straight (try to do it just with your arms, say 8 lenghts), have a powerful stroke underneath yourself (arm a little bent), straighten your arm when lifting out of the water and SLOWLY move it over to allow you arm to relax. Breathing is the hardest thing: try breathing on every stroke switching sides or only to one side to learn it. Lack of stamina makes you stop, so make a few lenghts using only your legs (holding to that floating thing).

Breast stroke is still impossible, I get awfully tired and, really, it doesn’t look like breast stroke when I perform it.

As my teacher said, in crawl your leags are only to keep the balance. Although it is possible to do it only using arms as it is, you start by taking a floathing thingy between your leags (it’s a smaller one than the square ones, just ask and they should give it to you) so it’s rather easy to stay on the surface. This exercise is for the balance and it was very difficult for me at first to keep myself straight. But later it really helps to learn a more powerful stroak as it is what should benefit your movement by 70%.

As my teacher said, my problem with breathing was that I turned my head. You don’t really have to do that, you turn yourself to one side so that your ear is under water. It’s also connected to moving your arm too fast over the water. When done right, you shpuld have plenty of time to breath in.

And I would really advise to split the whole thing into parts: do excersises for your arms and balance, then for your leags, for your breathing and then try to put it all together. It’s also important to always keep one arm in front of yourself. What I did wrong and still sometimes do is that I start the movement with my 2nd arm too early. You lose your balance. You can even try to put your both hands together and only then start a 2nd stroke. Actually, don’t be shy to use the floathing thingy, it really helps when you can’t breath in properly as it keeps you on the surface.