What helped me grok monads was to understand that monads are just a subset of functors. Then I did what I could to fully understand what functors were, since at

What helped me grok monads was to understand that monads are just a subset of functors. Then I did what I could to fully understand what functors were, since at that point they were still a kind of cargo-cult black box for me. let liftF = fmap liftF negate (Just 1) liftA negate (Just 1) liftM negate (Just 1) Realizing these all performed the same operation (if operating on a monadic value), and that `fmap` is just a `liftF` ("lift a regular function to work on a functor"), cleared some things up for me. This also helped: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Applicative_functors#A_sliding_scale_of_power https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Applicative_functors#A... So all these abstractions really just let you do different things with functions that normally don't take functor arguments. They make the function basically allow functor arguments (kind of), to save writing a lot of boilerplate within your functions; typically boilerplate that would be put at the start of every function. Once someone really gets the idea of what a functor is and why they can be useful, I think the rest is easy to understand once you read the definition of monads and applicatives.