Git is pretty unnatural, but CVS? That is much closer to the "copy a shared file back and forth between people", except with nice things such as "keep track of who is editing what", "know what the latest edition is", and "keep track of the history".
That said, if I was going to start out teaching someone coding today, version control would be timestamped .zip files.
Ouch, please don't. Anything else like bzr or hg or svn will be easier to grasp than git, can work locally too (IIRC for Subversion) and not much harder than zip files — don't get them used to the wrong mental model and bad habits.
Entirely besides the point I was trying to make. I wasn’t trying to say that it’s a good idea for a team, but that git is complicated. Too complicated for beginners.
That said, if I was going to start out teaching someone coding today, version control would be timestamped .zip files.