I second other people in this thread and say C/C++ and Python are the most desirable languages to learn, not just for writing maemo applications, but in general.

What you have to understand that Python is an interpreted language, .i.e., there is an interpreter program which runs your Python script. This allows for higher level features (e.g., you don't have to declare the type of variable) but also incurs some overhead in terms of speed and memory requirements. C++ on the other hand runs natively (i.e. faster in general) but is also harder to learn.

So, if you don't have any programming experience, start playing around with Python and learn the basics. There are also Python bindings for Qt, so you can learn about that as well (using Qt in Python and C++ is very similar). If you like it and get more proficient after a while, you can start looking at C++.