I just really sorely need examples in a syntax I understand.
You can use Hoogle (eg https://www.stackage.org/lts-6.9/hoogle?q=%3E%3E%3D) to look them up.
It's a bit daunting at first. But most code actually only uses operators from at most a few libraries. Once you understand Monoid, Applicatives and Monads and their operators, you'll be doing OK.
There are alphabetic names for their operators. But they are not used much---working programmers prefer the symbols. Alas, learning wouldn't be much easier with them either, because most of the work is in understanding the concepts. People would complain just as much about the cryptic names as about the cryptic symbols.
(The only mainstream library that really goes crazy with the symbols is 'lens'.)
I saw one of the problems was, that I had higher math in German and some translations aren't straight forward (monoid -> halbgruppe) so I often thought things I knew were entirely new concepts.
Yes, it's a bit of a shame that some things are so abstract that we can really give it good names. For example, the operation in the monoid is just any old operation that's associative. What name do you want to call that? I don't see anything that improves on the little Kringel that we make on the black-board, or the <> that Haskell uses.
Indeed.
And I don't like it at all. It seems as if everybody is afraid that web developers won't understand the concepts if they are expressed with mathematical symbols instead of JavaScript functions.