Swift is actually quite simple to pickup, and thanks to its static typing the compiler helps along the way. This functional side of what you can do with the language seems harder because the cryptic concepts, and on top of it there is no real built-in support. Overall though, once you've tried them out a bit they are not that hard, and actually very useful :)
Ahahah, that might be true :) Although because those concepts comes from category theory, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functor and there's more to it than just "it defines" map, keeping the "academic" name seems fair enough.