Honestly C imo is not that bad. It's actually a very small specification. There's not much to it. The actual amount of code you'd need to create a working C compiler is relatively tiny.

It stuck around all this time because concepts like null-terminated strings, arrays decaying to pointers, etc. are all very intuitive if your working in a language that's built to be as minimalistic and simple as possible.

If you understand these things I'd say you're already past the learning curve. Now just make sure you remember exactly how type definitions are parsed so that contrived type declarations don't cause you to lose marks on an exam.

The difficulty with C imo comes with people needing programming concepts abstracted away from them because they never actually learned how their computer represents or processes data.