Did anyone have trouble learning the idea of local vs. remote branches?

Today I was talking with someone that I collaborate with through Git and they still seemed to not get the idea that all branches in their repository are local, and that at least a 'git fetch' is needed to update the local tracking branches to the version in the central repository that we collaborate through. And this isn't the first time we've had such discussions.

It dawned on me that this person still hasn't grasped the idea behind fetch. A few other users that I know also have commented on how difficult fetch is to learn.

Most seemed to think that fetch would update their working directory, or their current branch, as there is no other way to "download changes from origin". They also seem to expect their local tracking branch to automatically update, especially when invoking `git checkout -b foo tracking-branch`.

Clearly there is a gap in communicating these ideas in a way that they can be understood by users. Of course in at least one case the users just isn't reading any Git documentation and plows ahead as though it were CVS ('cause everything's "just like CVS") *sigh*.