It’s not so unusual. I learned assembly before I learned C, mostly because I didn’t have a C compiler—or even know that I needed one! My family’s Windows 95 computer had QBASIC preinstalled (which amazingly I learned mostly by browsing the interactive help) and I discovered that in order to speed up my graphics routines, I had to write them in assembly in MASM (and DEBUG), also preinstalled. The fact that they were just there already, without requiring any installation or configuration, was enormously helpful as a beginner.

At ~10 years old, I didn’t have any frame of reference for how difficult this tack was compared to other languages, so I just accepted it as “this is what programming is like”. I only picked up C several years later as I got into programming languages and studied as many different languages as I could. Now I work in programming language technology as both a career and a hobby. :)

yup. taught myself ASM through countless hours debugging/tracing/reversing code (and also reading Intel's docs). i learned how to reverse before i really got interested in programming. i had a tiny bit of C++/Pascal experience from high school. C# came out and I saw an easy way to bust out quick windows apps with a decent GUI. made a hacking/macroing framework for Ultima Online in C#, really hideous, horrible, awful code....but I came up with some decent patches for the many different UO clients.