My limited experience has been different. I've been trying to make time to learn Scheme lately, and recursion seems simple enough. You can just practice it until it makes sense. What I find difficult is understanding what symbols are and what single-quoting actually means. No Scheme book I've seen yet just comes out and actually tells you in plain language what a symbol is.
(car (eval '(a b c))) vs. (car (a b c))
Do the same thing.
Have you read SICP? Somewhere in the 1st-3rd chapter there's an explanation of first-order evaluation that scheme uses. Once you know how scheme evals sexps, it makes sense that quote skips some of the steps of evaluation. I strongly recommend the SICP/Little Schemer/Seasoned Schemer if you haven't heard of them.
I'm still in chapter 1.
Thanks for the explanation of the single quote. Can I convince you to add something about what a "symbol" is (and if it's connected in some way to the single-quote mechanism)?