I think this is a very good advice, but for me it was the other way around: using assembly was easy when I had to because I already grok the pointers from C.

I remember in a programming language course we had to write a compiler for a subset of OCaml to MIPS assembly. I had literally no trouble adding support for references, while for others who did not grok C pointers (or had never programmed in C), it was less easy.