I enjoyed learning Haskell in an optional advanced course at our uni. The things which I like the most are higher order functions, playing with pointfree, combinator libraries, typeclasses, pattern matching and higher order types.

Only later did I click with monads and some other patterns like phantom types and such.

I think the sad part about learning Haskell is that everyone gets so up about monads while they definitely aren't the most important part but only one of many beautiful and magical parts of Haskell. Maybe if people stopped talking about monads so much and more about other parts of the language would people be way better at learning the language.