I know what recursion is (when a patten reoccurs within itself, typically a function that calls itself on one of its lines, after a breakout conditional... right?), and I can understand recursive functions if I study them closely. My problem is, when I see new examples, I'm always initially confused. If I see a loop, or a mapping, zipping, nesting, polymorphic calling, and so on, I know what's going just by looking at it. When I see recursive code, my thought process is usually 'wtf is this?' followed by 'oh it's recursive' followed by 'I guess it must work, if they say it does.'

So do you have any tips/plans/resources for building up your skills in this area? Recursion is kind of a wierd concept so I'm thinking the way to tackle it may be equally wierd and inobvious.