35mm film is dead. get a digital camera to learn by taking tons of pictures and be able to understand ISO, aperture, and shutter speed and their relationships to each other without having to buy tons of films and spending money on developing it to see your mistakes.
and back to 35mm being dead. digital SLR beats 35mm in every category quality, price, color, ease of use. name a category and DSLR has the upper hand. to compete with digital in film you have to go to medium format and that isnt just expensive, and harder to use its also heavier and harder to use for sports photography.
so now that we established that Digital SLR will give you the best of everything for learning choosing your camera is going to be up to you. everybody is going to tell you to get canon, to get Nikon, to get Sony ect.
do your research. what camera has the features you want, what camera has the system you would most like to buy into. once you buy a camera your stuck with that company unless your willing to throw away alot of money and start over with new lenses and new accessories.
the two main players are NIkon and Canon. their pretty much the same, depending on when you look into each comapany Nikon will have a better camera than Canon for 6 months followed by Canon having a better camera than Nikon for 6 months. it doesnt matter who you get their both great and you will have tons of things to choose from.
then there are a couple comapnies that are getting into the dSLR game such as:
Sony: they have a pretty full line of lenses and a decent amount of accessories for a company that didnt exist in this field a couple years ago.
Olympus: they have the worlds fastest autofocus. its really impressive I tried the E-3 out and its just instant. really cool especially for sports.
Pentax: very affordable with features perfect for ski photography. the cheapest weatherproof dSLR come from this company.
I personally just got a canon 40D, right now Nikon has the upper hand with the 300D which has many more features than the 40D the Nikon 300D has more megapixels, higher possible ISO, and tons of other features. but since ive used canon for a while trying to operate the Nikon was a real pain. nothing felt intuative but thats not Nikon's fault thats my fault. my friend who is a Nikon user has the exact same reaction when he touches a Canon camera. they do the same things but in differnt ways. and getting use to one way makes the other way seem unnatural.
feel free to ask any questions. I love talking tech stuff with people im a huge geek like that. (ohh and I dont think anyhting is hotter to a girl than a geek with a camera especially if you call yourself "photographer" or  "aspiring photographer" instead of geek with a camera