I have a few questions. I thought chars could only store a single letter. Also, why does the array not have curly braces

You are correct, normally a variable of type char would store only one letter. However, in this example he uses:

char bravo[] = "bravo";

Notice the brackets after bravo? That means it's an array of char objects. It could also be written like this:

    char bravo[6] = {'b', 'r', 'a', 'v', 'o', '\0'};

Another weird thing in C is that you have to end arrays of chars with '\0'. Surrounding the entire word in quotes is shorthand (char bravo[]="bravo"; ), in the C language, for the same thing. In other programming languages an array of char letters is called a "string".

And that's why the array doesn't have curly brackets - it's shorthand for an array of chars in C. It's a shortcut built into the C language. It's only used this way for chars, so you would never see:

//this is bad code, don't do this:
  int someNumber[] = "123,246.55";

oh and finally, in a printout use of '%' followed by a letter indicates a place holder. So after the quotations are closed, the variables listed separated by commas will replace the '%' in order. That symbol is followed by a letter corresponding to an integer or a float or a char, etc (I don't remember which is for what - %s is for chars I think, but you should look up the rest or just trust what the instructor wrote).

Hope this helps.

A char value is 1 byte and are encoded as numbers following the ASCII encoding. This can be letters, numbers and non-alphanumeric characters.

For example, a would be the char code of the number 2 is 50 (I think of the top of my head).

As for curly braces - it is the syntax of Obj C and this follows in Swift. It is as you are in effect sending a message to an object, its Obj C's way of making the syntax look more objective I think (personally!).