I learnt C before I learnt Perl and I'm glad I did. Perl is a good language to start on but the transition from C to perl is alot easier than from Perl to C. Perl is a lot more lenient than C and you will become frusterated because you will be struggling to do things in C that you could to in one line of perl. This may make you give up and just stick to Perl because it seems easier and you can see results faster. If you don't plan ever using C or Java than Perl is a good language to start in but if you have to learn C later on it may be harder or make you a sloppy programmer.

Right now I'm rewriting a Fortran program in Perl and I've never seen Fortran before in my life. If it wasn't for a C background I think understanding fortran would be alot harder.