Its not the syntax, its the concept that's hard. I read about 10 different monad tutorials, and it only made things worse. The only thing that made it click was

Its not the syntax, its the concept that's hard. I read about 10 different monad tutorials, and it only made things worse. The only thing that made it click was writing code that used them. (Some monadic parser code.) Seriously, reading monad explanations is like struggling in quicksand of abstraction. Only by making it concrete in working code did I make any progress. If I had to pick the most tractable monad, I would try the Maybe monad, use it for map lookups in Haskell's Data.Map, since its something you would commonly do with a Python dictionary anyway.