it’s a great candidate. It was my first “real” languages (i.e. the first language, that is not php/js)
you have a text file. then call the compiler on it, and then you have a exe file, that you can run. It does exactly what it is supposed to do without thinking about the browser, the webserver, the JVM, or some other weirdness.
I get, that doing “good cpp” is difficult. And using all the weird languages features is difficult. But as long as you use strings, ints, ifs, fors, you should be fine. Just don’t use generics, templates, new (keep everything on the stack), multi-inheritance, complex libraries, and it’s a nice beginner language.