Whether it's "confusing" is entirely subjective. I found Perl's syntax quite straightforward, having already been familiar with shell scripts, regular expressions, and sed (not to mention a variety of other languages I'd learned). But I suppose I was not your typical newbie programmer when I started learning Perl.

Maybe Perl wouldn't make for the ideal first language, but it's certainly not nearly as difficult as assembly, certain functional languages, or even C/C++.