Having just finished my first year of an IT degree this is what we studied as our 'first' programming languages - C++ and Java. (Actually found them rather similar to one another as well)
Neither of them at my beginner level are what I considered hard, and once you start picking up the basics you will find its a matter of learning the rest of the language in 'steps' so to speak, as in once we had the basics, I found that writing basic code was able to be expanded upon, and do more things once you got deeper into the language.
Remember, its all about algorithms (and pseudocode and flowcharts)!
