Have you spent a lot of time trying to write code using monads? If not, that's the only real way to learn I think. I wouldn't expect someone to understand what

Have you spent a lot of time trying to write code using monads? If not, that's the only real way to learn I think. I wouldn't expect someone to understand what object oriented programming or functional programming is unless they've tried to solve quite a few problems using those techniques. Try solving a non trivial problem on Haskell. You may not fully understand monads but you should get a feeling for it.