First off, why even consider Visual Basic non .NET? It's a deprecated language. VB.NET would be a great place to start if you wanted to only develop basic apps for Windows only. Anything C based will give you doors to other operating systems. The only difficulty is that you will need to learn memory management. Not difficult once you get used to it. In fact, once you get that down other languages are a breeze.

However, determining what language to learn really should be based off of your future intent. What do you plan to develop? Start with that...then choose the language that best fits your first need. Some people try to learn a language and then implement it. This is all wrong...it's like trying to create a need when needs already exist.