The syntax is inconsistent in many ways.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4025768/what-do-people-find-difficult-about-c-pointers

So basically, I want to be able to use pointers but in a sane way. Most of them are dependent of standard library than language anyway.

I can't afford time for going further low level like machine architecture or assembly language.

Does Pascal help? Does learning functional programming first help? If so, which small functional language( except for Haskell)?