I never really had much of a problem with the syntax, but the point at which the behavior of pointers really clicked for me (after a night of many segfaults of course) was when I realized that when you pass a pointer to a function, you're sending a copy of that pointer, just like with any other primitive type. E.g:

    void foo(int *p)
    {
        /* assignment won't be persistent after foo() returns; need to send **p */
        p = (int *)malloc(1024 * sizeof(int));
    }

Not sure why my brain had decided to make an exception for pointers for the rule that all variables are passed as copies when I first learned C, but after that I never had any problems.