Personally, I find that having two or more languages under one's belt and being relatively familiar in both gives you a perspective that change is not always wrong and that compatibility in itself is useful. I often find myself creating polyfills to create missing or obsolete VB6 functions when programming in VB.NET and sometimes even when using .js - and vice versa.

Curly brackets, semi colons, BEGIN and END statements, ==, += from C, .js or Delphi all make some sort of sense when you have to program in them for a while and become familiar - and not so alien. Sometimes BASIC is more understandable in its brevity, certainly when compared to Delphi. Most often though, it is more verbose but as a result quite understandable, certainly when compared to C.

BASIC is a good place to start but is important to remember to maintain the ethos of being a beginner language capable of more or less anything with a fair wind. If we just follow that mantra but also allow flexibility. we are still in a good place.