I am not sure how many you will meet here. Never played with Intel's efforts myself but gun to my head I could probably recreate a 555 timer or something you could reasonably make on a breadboard with logic gates and wires in vhdl and verilog*. Verilog is probably closer to C syntax and while it is a bit clunky it is also probably the easier in/debugging effort where vhdl is about as unforgiving as assembly, or indeed assembly that is also doubling up as hardware design, though equally as potent. Others are moving away from those approaches in favour of others, and while it often gets a bit proprietary for my tastes where the others above are somewhat open it does provide an easier in.
*trying to do something like
in FPGA... no thanks.
It would probably also depend upon your ultimate goal.
FPGA as literal 1:1 give or take power requirements emulator is probably a different approach to ASIC prototyping, which is different again to rapid reaction/redevelopment (think security breach but that is OK as it can all be reprogrammed) hardware based stuff, which is different in some ways again to people wanting FPGAs to act as high performance specific applications (there was a nice presentation at C3 some years ago where people were using random devices with beefy FPGAs to do various brute force things**, might be nice as an intro as well or at least seeing what goes for the learn using an existing*** project).
**not necessarily the ones I was thinking but a good start
and for others not necessarily sure what is going on
***generally my favourite way of learning something. Get something in, build it, tweak it, break it, fix it, expand it... and then maybe go back for the basics.
At one point people would probably have been pointed at the CPLD world and told to play around in that for a few months before making the leap. Today with micros and minicomputers knocking on the door of FPGA (by way of example I shared a video the other day for people using a raspberry pi + fairly basic adapter board to allow it to recreate all the various shiny CPUs+RAM+extras for the amiga which was a 16 bit era/486 era DOS competitor in terms of potency. Even 5 years ago that would be FPGA or you are a billionaire with a passion project making ASICs.) I don't know that I necessarily would, though it is also not the worst thing.
Some particularly sadistic teachers will bore you to death with SPICE for 6 months and then move to FPGAs. I can see its merits (at that point you are guaranteed to know your gates, shift registers, quine mcluskey/karnaugh, timing concerns and all the other fun things) but I don't like it at all.