trong disagreement with all of the C proponents here. C++11 first. Learning C first teaches you a number of bad habits and archaic practices, and, like coming from a pure Java background, stands a good chance, if you are not sufficiently flexible, of turning you into a terrible C++ programmer.
I'm a bit of a hypocrite here - I learned FORTRAN and C long before I learned C++, and the C++ I learned first was a much less mature language than the current one, especially in terms of patterns - but I would like to point out a common fallacy that appears in nearly every single response that advocates C. Every one of them says something like "knowing C is a prerequisite for understanding C++" or "C++ is an extension of C". This is a clear indicator that they do not understand C++ as well as they believe they do. Here's the thing... to really understand C++, you have to understand the machine code it generates. You can best understand the machine code in terms of assembly, and C is closely mapped to assembly... but efficient machine code generated from well written C++ no longer in any way resembles well written C, and that's the point that the C advocates completely miss.
Modern C++ requires you to think in several paradigms at once. Once upon a time, long before the first standard, C++ encapsulated two paradigms - procedural programming (like C) and an object = data + methods + method overrides version of object oriented programming (like Java without annotations or reflection). Learning C taught a couple of bad habits, but it wasn't a huge jump from C to C++, and learning to write terse functions in C actually made you a better C++ programmer. Now, though, C++ has evolved to incorporate generic programming (in a manner far beyond anything Java could ever dream of), generative and algorithm driven programming (think of this as a static form of functional programming), and functional programming (though there are limits to lambdas in C++, mostly on account of the early evaluation of execution paths) - and, more to the point, it has evolved into a language that, in its best-use form, incorporates these paradigms seamlessly to express models of whatever problem is being solved. This is not something that comes easily to someone who has taken a deep dive into a single-paradigm language like C or Java. It comes more easily to someone who has started with a language like Python, as you have, though concurrency tends to be a difficult hurdle for people coming from Python.
Every so often I find myself trying to integrate an obvious C programmer who learned some superficial C++ concepts into a deep C++ codebase, and the effort is always painful. Do yourself a favor... if you do feel compelled to learn C first, don't go straight to C++. Fluency in Python does mitigate some of the pitfalls, but the temptation to view C++ as an extension of C is still a danger if you attempt that transition.
