Earlier quoted context omitted.
... and figure out how to deal with allocating and freeing things. Taken together, pointers, and manual memory management are a big chunk to bite off. The syntax isn't the problem, in other words.
For sake of argument: How often is the syntax the primary problem in learning a new language? The examples that come to mind are Forth and APL/K/J (all of which I've only dabbled in), but the reason they have such unconventional syntaxes is because they're conceptually very different.
And yet, because of the syntax I don't remember learning PHP. It was pretty much one night of reading the manual to get to know the API, and that was it. They're close conceptually too, not just in syntax.