Scripting vs. Curly Bracket Language

I've been doing a lot of reading lately and yet I am still stumped. In your own opinion, would you say that the best language to learn with is a scripting language or a curly brackets language?

People always say about how simple scripting languages are but at the same time I want to make sure I'm not making some shitty mistakes that'll bite me in the ass when it comes to creating more complex code. Int he same vein, I don't want to start way over my head and regret it later.

I'm not asking which language is best, just what language set I should choose from, whether you chose from that category to start learning or you wish you had.

"Start with PHP for a year then upgrade to Ruby."
I'm looking to build stand alone applications, so would that make learning PHP usless or is it useful simply as a simple language?