Really excited for Swift. I've tried and failed many times to learn Objective C and felt that the barrier to entry was a bit to high for myself. As a someone who writes JavaScript for a living, Swift is very inviting.
Not trying to be rude, but if you've tried and actually FAILED to learn Objective-C multiple times, then you will have a much bigger problem with actually learning the Cocoa framework yourself. Objective-C does have a non-standard syntax, but its barrier of entry for actual learning is purely psychological and not technical.
I suggest http://www.raywenderlich.com/ and his fantastic books with examples. While I actually think I've been doing Objective-C longer than most of his writers, when there is some area I haven't worked in yet they usually have a high quality, simple to follow example on how do do a thing that's a great jumping off point to getting going and then understanding further once you get the main thing in front of you.
Maybe the mistake could lie in starting with Objective C without first learning C? I'm thinking that a reasonably solid C foundation helps a lot in understanding why and how Obj-C works.
I went straight from a CFML/Java/Javascript web developer to picking up Objective C in a week. I had some coaching from a C/C++ expert, who learned ObjC on the fly and wrote a first draft of an app I designed, but from there I worked out how to solve my own problems and eventually became a moderately high skilled ObjC developer.
I have subsequently leveraged that ObjC experience to become somewhat proficient in plain C, a skill I appreciate today and something I might never have learned otherwise.
I learned Objective-C before I learned C, back in the early 90s. Before that I'd learned Basic and Pascal. Objective-C clicked with my brain pretty easily.
While knowing C certainly helps, it is not essential to learning Objective C, at least it wasn't for me. If you try first to understand it at a high level, then it is very doable (and fun!).
Cocoa, the API behind iOS and Mac Objective-C, is the hardest part, and is still there.
I suggest going through some detailed tutorials on building an X, so you get the feel for how views, view controllers, objects and everything all interact.
The new playgrounds look EXCELLENT for doing that! Best of luck
Programming languages are like vehicles. If you can drive one, you mostly know how to drive the other. JavaScript has a lot more gotchas than Objective-C. If you feel comfortable with the weird "this", closures, and prototypes, Objective C shouldn't be hard. Pick up a copy of K&R to get familiar with C and then read the Objective-C docs.
