I think the first step here is to put your expectations into perspective. Functional programming also is a range of complexity. If you're not used to functional programming and try to read articles targeted at the high-end you'll naturally struggle to understand them.

I still remember "not getting" OO in university in my first lecture. I had programmed BASIC, C, Pascal, PHP before. And if someone would have tried to explain me the idea by means of the visitor pattern, it would surely have made me say "eh?!?" too. So allow yourself to start slowly.

I'm also still dabbling in functional programming - at least that's what it feels like reading about monoids etc - but by actually using functional programming languages in my more serious spare time projects I feel I get a better and better understanding. And "those" articles start to speak more to me.