Especially for beginners its a bad language. You have the understand artificial concepts about classes, objects, abstract states before you re able to learn the important stuff like if/else, looping etc pp.
I would always give beginners a language which is at least in their way as possible.
It also encourages good basic habits, such as not making a variable mutable unless you specifically need to (val is way more common than var, the IDE makes them very visually distinct).