I agree, the jump from BASIC to C can be a hard one. C is not the best language to learn in, though. It is not strongly typed, and beginners can get themselves in trouble with its power. A good language to learn in is Modula2, or PASCAL. These (they are very similar) are much closer to C. The difference is that you have to declare the variables with their types in Modula, and the language makes a clean separation between procedures and functions. (A procedure does something, and a function returns something.) I'm not sure what universities are using these days, but in my time it was Modula2, and I'm thankful for that.
However, you are not a rich person, you are a highschool student, and probably can't afford to buy several different compilers. I think there is a free version of Delphi, and I have seen some free pascal/modula compilers, but can't think of where this was.
I don't know why, but I have never liked using BASIC, and I have never liked using C++ but I love C. Perhaps it is what one gets use to?