Confused about the error I'm getting on the first two questions...

Yeah, there are. When declaring a new value the asterix is used. The treehouse blog has a great article that you might want to spend time reading. You can find it here and part the way down the page you will find this tidbit. :)

The * symbol is actually an operator that is used to de-reference a pointer. De-what a what now? Pointers are pretty much what they sound like. They “point” to a location in memory where the actual data is stored. That location in memory is the true container that holds the data. Pointers are a part of regular C and are used because they are more efficient. When we use pointers in our programs, we only need to store and copy a simple pointer, which is really just an address for a space in memory. It’s a relatively small piece of data. If we instead had to store and copy the data being pointed to, we might very quickly run into problems of not having enough memory. For example, it’s much more efficient to simply point to the location for a large video file and use that pointer multiple times in code than to actually have to use all the data of that large video file every time we access it in code. Okay, so back to the asterisk: what does it mean to de-reference a pointer? It simply means that we obtain the value stored in the memory where the pointer is pointing to.