I have fiddled with BASIC since the days of the Speccy. But it was only after learning C/C++ at college that I started playing with 68K assembler. I taught myself 68K from a book I stole from my college library. To be honest it wasn't too difficult.
And then I learnt Java and OpenGL at university.
And now I am using C# and SQL while at work
IMHO learning C would probably be a good primer for learning assembly coding... I would recommend 'C by Example' from QUE publishing - that's how me and my brother learnt C.