Symfony can be overwhelming for a newbie, but that's because web development is becoming a bigger field every day. There is so much to learn, and Symfony will teach you all kinds of best practices and other things that are not framework-specific at all. To learn Symfony is to learn web development done right.

Laravel is basically a wrapper around Symfony, to make it simpler and easier. A newbie might prefer to use that, but at some point after feeling comfortable with the basics like MVC, ORM, etc. you will definitely want to move to the more professional Symfony.

Yup, Laravel is a great starter framework. Like jafaku said, it uses a lot of Symfony components under the hood so it will be familiar territory if you decide to try out Symfony one day.

Be sure to check out Jeffrey Way's Laracasts, it's a really good site offering tutorials mostly for newbies.