I violently disagree with not learning assembly. Absolutely learn assembly. Just pick anything else other than x86 assembly. After learning the basics of assembly you will never have any trouble understanding pointers or any of the "hard" concepts in C.
x86 is a convoluted horror. A lot of it makes no sense except in the context of backwards compatibility, which the documentation won't necessarily point out. I highly recommend picking up a microcontroller to learn on instead of a microprocessor. Microcontrollers are mostly self-contained systems, while microprocessors are just a small piece of the picture and have complicated interfaces to the rest of the system components.
I recommend picking something in the Freescale 68HC* family. The addressing modes and instruction set are fairly clean and the architecture is simple. Something based on ARM would probably also be straightforward to learn. Don't worry about choosing a 32 bit chip, 8 or 16 bit is fine. 8 and 16 bit chips are typically simpler and will still teach you the important concepts.
Spend a couple of weeks on this and your understanding of C will be easier to come by and more thorough.
x86 is a convoluted horror. A lot of it makes no sense except in the context of backwards compatibility, which the documentation won't necessarily point out. I highly recommend picking up a microcontroller to learn on instead of a microprocessor. Microcontrollers are mostly self-contained systems, while microprocessors are just a small piece of the picture and have complicated interfaces to the rest of the system components.
I recommend picking something in the Freescale 68HC* family. The addressing modes and instruction set are fairly clean and the architecture is simple. Something based on ARM would probably also be straightforward to learn. Don't worry about choosing a 32 bit chip, 8 or 16 bit is fine. 8 and 16 bit chips are typically simpler and will still teach you the important concepts.
Spend a couple of weeks on this and your understanding of C will be easier to come by and more thorough.