As someone who went through the same thing, my best advice is, don't read monad tutorials; just write monadic code. Reading too much can just be confusing and

As someone who went through the same thing, my best advice is, don't read monad tutorials; just write monadic code. Reading too much can just be confusing and might make you feel like an idiot for not understanding it yet. In the beginning it might be weird, and you'll no doubt spend a great deal of time puzzling over obscure type errors, but it will eventually become intuitive, if you're actually writing code and working through it. Haskell is a theory-heavy language, but it's still a programming language, which is actually meant to do things. There's no substitute for experience. Perhaps try going through "Write Yourself a Scheme" which uses monads from the outset, or look at "Monad Transformers Step-by-Step" (be warned though, it starts off mostly simple but then makes a sudden and somewhat jarring leap forward). Try to implement a stack with "push" and "pop" monadic operations (use this as a starting point: http://brandon.si/code/the-state-monad-a-tutorial-for-the-confused/ http://brandon.si/code/the-state-monad-a-tutorial-for-the-co... but keep in mind it's much more important to WRITE the code, and play with it, than to try to understand how it's all working just via explanations). For what it's worth, here's my ten cent explanation of monads: A monad is interface for containers. A type which implements this interface must have two methods, `return` which inserts an object into a container, and `bind` which says what should happen when we use the value in one container to create a new container.