I think both suck for a beginner, but if you must use one of them, you should use C++.
I really feel like as a beginner vanilla C is going to be more intuitive and straightforward than trying to learn C++ out the door.
As long as you are just dealing with your own code, you don't have to use any of C++'s advanced features, and can adopt them at your own pace. The most important thing for the beginner is that C++ lets you get away with never doing manual memory allocation if you just use std::vector, std::string, references, etc. everywhere. No news, no deletes, no pointers. You don't have to understand templates (or even classes, really) to use vector as a replacement of array, just like you don't have to understand streams in order to write "std::cout << ".
In C you can't do anything without first learning memory management inside and out, and even then you will constantly be tripping up and mired in debugging something.
