Different people will recommend different languages.
Straight C is fairly easy because functional programming is straight-forward, it's easy to trace the execution path. But memory management is a pain, you'll have to do a decent amount of book-keeping that other languages take care of automatically. If you want to do low level code you'll need to know C eventually. Also Gnome, GTK, Glib, etc are all done in C so if you want to use them it's recommended that you know C (yes there are C++ bindings in gtkmm, but I have no idea how good they are).
Java is supposedly nice, it's object oriented which people seem to love for some reason. The memory management is taken care of in the background for you so you can concentrate on the core logic. But, it's java.
C++ is half-way between Java and C, it's object oriented and parts of the memory management are taken care of, but you can still manipulate it if you wish. Most userland apps on Windows are done in C++ and AFAIK everything that uses QT and thus everything in KDE is C++.
C# seemed decent to me but I was using VS.Net which does a lot of hand-holding, it's sort of like a C++/Java hybrid designed by MS. The language itself isn't bad but you're tied to a CLR, either the .Net one from MS or Mono.
Python is supposed to be easy to start with. It's objected oriented and interpreted so debugging is easy. I never liked the idea of using whitespace for flow control, but a lot of people seem to disagree. There are Python bindings for just about everything and interpreters for every OS I can think of.
Perl is a hybrid of a lot of things, it's like C but there are objected oriented parts and the language itself is very liberal. Like Python there are modules and bindings for anything you can think of and it's interpreted (with compilers available) so debugging and testing is simple. But because the language is so liberal it's easy to write code that's unreadable an hour after you wrote it. I personally really like perl and use it, but I wouldn't recommend it for a starter language.
VB is bad, it teaches bad habits and it's ugly and ties you to Windows. VB.Net is supposedly better, but I see no reason to use it when C# is available. VB will let you get a quick app running but in the long run it's a bad idea to use VB for anything more than MS Access projects or non-production demos.
And after all that I'll say that the language itself is largely irrelevant. If you have the mindset of a programmer you'll be able to pickup any language. Your best bet is to just get some programming classes and see how it goes, having a teacher and other students to discuss and answer questions will help immensely. But failing that you'll just have to pick a book and be persistent because you'll most likely get pretty frustrated along the way.