Glen Watts1:

I don't know Java at all (yeah, I know, never had a need to learn it) but I know that it fulfils much the same role at school and college level as Pascal did for me as a 16 year old (which was 15 years ago now, crikey)

More or less. Java was the first language I learned 5 years ago. It catches most of your misakes (type-mismatch, array out of bounds) on run-time for you instead of blowing up. It is a little lenient on some rules like C++ and shares some common syntax, so it's a great starter language.