Its easy to go from knowing C++ to VC..its significantly harder to go the other way. So if you only ever want to learn one lang go with VC, otherwise go with c++.

Also watch your focus, don't worry as much about syntax at first, you need to learn how to program, for most professional programmers the lang is irrelevant and they can pick up a new lang. in a week to a month(a month if you are going from a functional background like c or perl to say a procedural like LISP). This is because the underlying principles of all langs are the same its just the syntax you need to figure out.