I've taught pointers to multiple people who struggled. C makes pointers difficult by having some syntax oddities that seem to mainly be intended to save a few characters of source code. The biggest trouble is that C often gives you a free ampersand ("&") when you need one.
Consider that p=f and p=&f both can be used to assign the address of a function f to a function pointer p. To a beginner it could look like p takes either type, or that the & really serves no purpose.
Consider these four lines of code:
char *p1 = "hello";
char a1[] = "hello";
char *p2 = &"hello";
char a2[] = &"hello"; // only this one is junk
For the assignment to p1 you get an implied & effectively added into your source code. It may be convenient, but it leads beginners astray with muddled thinking about types.
A little-known limitation of C is that you can't really pass arrays to functions. You get that free & again, meaning that you end up passing a pointer. We should need to do printf(&"hello world\n") but that would be inconvenient, so instead we have a language that appears to behave in inconsistent ways.
Array dimensionality plays a role here. A real X by Y array, with two dimensions X and Y, can syntactically be used in the same way as an array of pointers to arrays. After being passed to a function, the sizeof operator breaks for both (since now you have just a pointer) but the 2-dimensional nature is lost for only one of the styles.
Even the bracket notation is trouble. It is why cute stuff like 4["foo"] can be used to mean 0. That seems harmless enough, but the oddities extend well beyond syntax that nobody should be using. Other issues are pointer arithmetic being surprising and some people being surprised that pointers have types beyond simply "pointer".
I find that the best hope for a clear understanding is to constantly remind the student of the above, right from the start. This is slower going, but it prevents serious misunderstandings from persisting and building on each other.