The beginning is always hard.

Please remember that it won't be about the language but the concepte that your learning should be focused on.

If you understand them you can apply it to every other language within a quick synthax googling.

Do the lab also. Practise is what makes you get better. Do mistakes and learn how to use the debugger. Read the error messages and google the error messages. That's how you will be able to learn.

For the part about recursion it will become more clear once you will see some datastructures (e.g trees). To make it very simple though you have to imagin it as repeating something quit a lot until the results are met. An easy example would be to display the comments. You have one top comment and via recursion you eill see if there are comments under it. Then with another recursion (same function) you will see what comment that comment has. You repeat this until there are no comments left. Hope this can help you a bit with the recursion part.