How to explain C pointers (declaration vs. unary operators) to a beginner?

Question

I have had the recent pleasure to explain pointers to a C programming beginner and stumbled upon the following difficulty. It might not seem like an issue at all if you alre

Answer 1

The type of the expression *bar is int; thus, the type of the variable (and expression) bar is int *. Since the variable has pointer type, its initializer must also have pointer type.

There is an inconsistency between pointer variable initialization and assignment; that's just something that has to be learned the hard way.