You know what's worse than C++? C. I studied C far less than I did C++ though.
Also, this probably seems counter intuitive, but it might be worth it to learn COBOL. Nobody uses it anymore, EXCEPT like government agencies that have used it absolutely forever and refuse to upgrade their systems (and this happens a ton) and there is a huge shortage of COBOL programmers out there for obvious reasons.
I never learned COBOL myself so I don't know how hard it is or isn't compared to other languages, but just thought I'd put that out there.