difficulty in understanding c pointers when it is on it's own

Question

I am studying pointers for c and this placement of * really really confuses me.

I understand what int *a is..

But what is

a = malloc(n * sizeof(int) ) 

I understand what above is doing but why is * in the middle of by itself?? This part really confuse me so please someone can explain to me?

Answer 1

unary * means dereferencing and binary * means multiplication.

Answer 2

The * in the middle is a multiplicative operator. The result of the binary * operator is the product of the operands.
Do not confuse it with unary dereference operator which applies only on pointer objects.