We've gone through this in a few different threads; worth searching for. Personally, I favor Scratch particularly with some of the new structures, because the key factor is learning programmatic thinking not semantical content.
Many, many tutorials start jamming in language elements with small marginally interesting tasks. If a tutorial doesn't start with defining an interesting problem that drives the learning or create sandbox experiment scenarios, I would continue looking.
Is Scratch a programming languages? Granted it's been over a day since I've done any professional programming... I say yes as it is used to automate processing on a computing device. Can you make a commercial application with it? No. Are all the skills learned applicable to learning other languages? Fer sher.
