C is a much simpler language than Perl and much easier to learn.

That vastly depends on what you mean by learning a language, and how familiar the potential programmer is with low level concepts like computer memory.

If she is an experienced assembler programmer, C is probably easier to learn than Perl. If she has no clue about memory, pointers, segmentation faults and the like, Perl is easier to learn.

Also it depends on how you count: it might be easier to learn 90% of the features of the C programming language than learning 90% of the features of Perl. But the difference is that with 20% of Perl features you can already achieve a whole lot of stuff - but not with C.

So if you count "learn enough of a language to get stuff done", I disagree that C is easier to learn than Perl.