Easiest Programming language to Learn?

Many programming language and concepts are closely related. What's the easiest to learn? If you were to recommend one language to learn, and then build off that knowledge to learn others, what would it be?

The simplest language to learn is probably Visual Basic. However it can be limiting depending on what you want to do. You can write web based applications with it. C++ is not the easiest language to learn from scratch, in fact it is probably the hardest.

Seems to me that you need to learn about programming fundamentals, fundamentals that apply to any programming regardless of language.

Try this for starters:

http://www.w3schools.com/

When I was knew to this field that time i was also wondering which language is best, then as i worked on each language I was little able to take some concrete points on the basis where i could list the languages, and these are as follows:
QBasic, then Visual Basic, the Ruby, then Python, then you get into the bigger languages (C, C++, Java, ASM, etc.)

I learned QB when I was 10, VB when I was 12, Ruby and Python at 13, C, C++, and Java all at 14. I learned ASM way later.

ANSI C is probably one of the easiest languages to learn, but you won't be writing GUI apps or websites with it. Its a great foundation for all the professional languages out there, such as C++, C#, Java and PHP.

I would not go into VB since Microsoft is phasing it out and replacing it with C# (.NET) in the future.