Python in definitely one of the easier languages to learn if you have some basic programming experience. You will definitely be fine with your background.
I never learned/used Java. I only had some C and Matlab/Octave experience, I was able to pick up Python OK. I am no expert by any means but can do the basics and stuff. I mainly use it for data analysis.
I was a front-end web developer with JavaScript, working with Angular. At my job had the opportunity to start working with the Data Science team and I loved it. Now transitioned to full-time data scientist position, working in Python -- it was an easy transition.
The most popular prebuilt machine learning framework, TensorFlow, has a Python API. This has helped its popularity in the area of data science where it was already big before thanks to iPython (now Jupyter)
I never learned/used Java. I only had some C and Matlab/Octave experience, I was able to pick up Python OK. I am no expert by any means but can do the basics and stuff. I mainly use it for data analysis.