I don't think I've ever had a problem with pointers, and it may be due to the way they were first introduced to me. I read a book that said to think of * as 'value-at' and & as 'address-of'. Well, except that the * in pointer declarations (char* etc) IS different, and I just read that as 'star', so I know that its a declaration of a pointer.

Anyway, ever since then, I've always said those words in my head when reading c/c++ code, and it's always made sense. Its true I had a little assembler experience before I came to c though.