Yes. Be sure to jump straight into the most modern C++ practices and avoid thinking of it like C (with all its focus on non-type-safe pointer manipulations).
Other people have other opinions, of course. Care most about the opinion of your boss and team mates. If you show up with a C++ style far beyond what they are used to they will think you are a nut.
I'm going to say no, because C++ seems closer to Java at first but it's really not. You'll probably spend too much time learning about templates and its object system instead of learning to think in the things that make C and C++ unique—pointers, pointer arithmetic, explicit handling of error conditions, low-level control of memory, preprocessor, etc.
