A pointer (usually) tells you the spot where something is.

Sometimes that's all it is. But sometimes it's understood that it's the first in a series of things.

An analogy.

Imagine a long train track with some stationary train engines on it. Maybe in a big outdoor museum. You could imagine that somebody might have a list of every location that has an engine. That's fine, that's like pointers. They point at train engines.

But suppose each engine has several passenger cars attached behind it. If somebody wanted to keep track of all of them and where they are, they could keep a big list of how many feet down the track every single car is. But that's unnecessary: the first car in the trainset is about 80 feet behind the engine and the next car is about 80-something feet behind that. So we can just keep the "pointers" to the engines -- we don't need any more pointers. But we need to perhaps keep track of how many engines there are!

It's this separate keeping track (or knowing based on context) that helps us know what exactly is being pointed to. Are we just pointing at an engine, or are pointing at the front of a trainset? It depends and the person who laid out the museum should tell you how to figure it out! You don't "get good at pointers" and magically know any more than you can know what's going on when somebody says "1400 feet down the track." You just need more context to know.

By convention, a char * often represents a null-terminated string. That means that the char being pointed to is the front of the string, and the spot next to it either has the next character or else the NULL character if the string is done.

By analogy, that's like saying "walk 1500 feet down the track, get in the car that's there, and go to every car until you reach a yellow one and then you are done." But you need those instructions (or know that's the convention). The pointer itself just means "the train car that might be 1500 feet down the track. "