As I was a beginner and a friend right now is trying to learn Javascript, HTML and CSS. I said to him to learn the basics of Javascript that it is used worldwide, can do other stuff on After Effects, Unity, etc (he is a digital artist) and when he finished learning the basics then and only then start learning the advanced of the most common language used today and then to learn something new and something that probably is going to be used in the future.
When I was in college, my first approach with code was pseudo code which everyone does, but then we made the jump to JAVA just like that after learning pseudo code with Alice (move forward, turn right, move back, etc) we made the jump to JAVA importing libraries, using variables named x,y,z, a, b and c without any knowledge of why it is done like that why just those names, why importing something if we have not even begin and that made a hell for me and the whole class, only the ones that already knew something about coding got that and advanced which was about 20% of the class and the teacher moved on just because of that 20% .
After that nightmare I started using Flash and after taking an advanced course of AS3 my eyes were open and found that AS3 probably should've been the best way to go for visual people to learn basics understand what is coding and learning object oriented programming. After learning AS3 and using for a couple years AS3 and seeing it approaching to its dead I switched to Javascript and Unity, I started using scripts to run tasks, detect collision, change objects behaviour, etc and it was a simple change for me.
Why I'm trying to say is that it was easy for me to learn AS3 instead of JAVA, obviously AS3 is simpler but I actually could implemented easily and could see the results of my code in real time and real applications, why? Because I could start experimenting and doing stuff that I thought were crazy but actually were pretty normal, I did a flash app that as a guitar player it would hear how loud you were playing and change the beat of the backing track which would have been an almost impossible task to do on JAVA for me at that moment. So seeing and using in real world applications what you've learned is a big help of growing which is a big down of college, a lot of my friends did not had the same approach to code like me and 95% of them choose a road away from code.