I guess the answer is simply: just study funcional programming. 30 minutes into any basic haskell course (e.g. the wikibook, or real world haskell) and you would know what a type constructor is. I don't know, you can't expect to magically know things without studying them first? :) What you mean when you say "functional programming speak" is just common technical terms with a specific technical meaning. You wouldn't complain you don't understand the meaning of "Minkowsky metric" before learning relativity :p