I wish that I had done this when I was learning to program. I learnt on Fortran, and since then have used Perl, PHP, TCL and other scripting languages. Now I'm trying to learn C++ and I'm finding it a very painful experience. I think untyped variables have really spoiled me!
Having said that, I'm learning from the very bottom, drawing lines, triangles and other things using just pointers - which is proving very instructive, as it has made me much more aware of what goes on 'under the hood'. Which can only be a good thing!