So much of this! I remember the older kids talking about Pascal (they were using TurboPascal at the time) and to me it was some mystical, highly-advanced form of magic, a sort of "more complex" BASIC. However, I never actually learned Pascal or used it, because I jumped directly from BASIC to C (actually ended up doing both for a while). The reason I even found out about C, was because I asked my computer teacher in junior high how people made games, and she told me that it was a language called C. So that summer I got myself an ANSI C book and started teaching myself C.
It was very difficult at first but I slowly got the hang of it. By junior year of high school we were doing C++, and having done C it was really easy for me to switch to C++.