I had a similar problem with the type system in Haskell. I'd look at Haskell code and it was obtuse to me. Even reading books, it was hard for me to understand some stuff until I started writing code... but writing code was difficult because I didn't understand it.

For me the key was just doing toy problems over and over again. Without understanding the idioms, it's hard to dive in and write something real. I think Rust is approachable if you take it like that (or at least it was when I looked at it about 2 years ago).