"I keep hearing that I should learn a simpler programing language before getting into C# or C++"
You keep hearing from people who have "learned programming" the wrong way. You should learn PROGRAMMING first. (Learning programming is no more learning a computer language than learning Spanish is learning doctoring in Spain.) The best book I've found, over many years of teaching programming, has been Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs". It's written in English, and teaches programming.
After that (and it can take a few months to really grasp all of it), C# won't be terribly difficult, but VB or PHP will be a lot easier to start with. (you can almost learn the PHP with nothing more than the PHP help file [*IF* you understand programming], but it's a fairly powerful language.) Once you understand programming, all you need to learn is the syntax of a particular languages, and the little idiosyncrasies of each. For example, in VB, a string is a string. In C-ish languages, it's an array of characters that you usually access with a pointer to the array. (You can access VB string with pointers too, but it's a mess - pointers to arrays of pointers ...)
If you understand programming, that previous sentence makes sense to you - if you don't, you're saying "huh?", and wondering what you're getting into. Now maybe you understand why I say that you should learn programming, as a thing unto itself. In order to use C, C++ or C#, you have to understand what a "pointer to a string" is - after learning what "Algorithms ..." teaches, you'll say "pointers? Okay, next?"
Learn to fly a plane and you can learn to fly one with Spanish instruments pretty easily. Learn Spanish and you'll probably crash on take-off.