...but its impossible to learn useful generic techniques if you are always stuck in assembler.

Assembler is great when you know what you are doing, not so great if you have to understand things like the fetch-execute cycle inside your specific flavour of processor.

And then when you use a HLL because unless you are in a tiny subset of the real embedded processor workspace, you WILL use techniques that aren't workable.There is much, much more to programming than writing code, and many people (including some 8052.commers) don't realise it.

Mind you I suppose you could start out with LOGO, which is where I expect I'll start my three year old when he can read....