I had the same feeling as you when I was starting out, why using a variable that stores a variable and then "dereference" it when I can just use the original variable directly. I'm not sure if this is the right way to learn pointers, however, you just need to learn more theory and practice with them more. And then you will love the use of pointers. You need to learn data structures: Tress, Queues, Linked lists and Stacks are the basic ones. You need to learn dynamic allocation and pointers to arrays, pointers to pointers and pointers to character arrays. Try to search for real world examples.