[Arrrlex]

I think this is the mistake a lot of people make: they form an intuition of monads after seeing lots of examples of them, and then they try to communicate that intuition without just saying "here are lots of examples of monads".

[xupybd]

That could be it. Perhaps my lack of understanding of category theory means I've only developed the pattern recognition for monads but not a deep understanding. So I can only explain it as the abstract thing all of these things have.

[schwurb]

I am gonna be heavily opinionated, take my words with a bit of salt ;)

Here it goes:

1. One understood monads when one is able to write a monadic interface that behaves like any intermediate haskell would expect it to behave. This is not a hard task.

2. Screw the abstract stuff. While fascinating, really few people understand concepts going from abstract to concrete rather than the other way around. And don't get me wrong, I don't think these kind of people are better theorists or problem solvers, they just have to seem a special relationship with symbols. If you are one of those people, you would likely know - in any case, I would encourage to write 3-5 examples of monads in Haskell or Java or JavaScript or whatever language suits you and go from there.