Hello Katie,

Welcome !

I`m sure you`ll be hearing from others far more experienced than me ( halfway through acoustic 1) but figured I could give you some tips and encouragement from my perspective.

1) It will be a bit painful until the calluses form. That takes a few weeks. When your guitar store reopens, you may want to have the action lowered and possibly either substitute a smaller guage string or maybe nylon if things don`t get better after a few weeks.

2) Yes, place your fingers just behind the frets for best sound.

3) As for time on each lesson, of course that can vary greatly for each person as well as different lessons. My guage for permitting myself to go to the next lesson was if I was able to fully grasp the concepts in the lesson and to be able to play the song tutorial pretty well at least 80% of the time. An hour per day is probably plenty enough for now until the calluses form and your fingers and hands strengthen.

Again, I`ve only been playing for about 3 months. Hope this helps.