I took symbolic logic at community college, so I can give you an idea. I hope this will be helpful.
It’s mathematical in the sense that there’s a lot of usage of symbols to represent logical statements. Here’s such an example:
- A --> B.
- ~B. —————
- Therefore, ~A.
This may look complicated, but it was all conceptually easy for me to grasp, provided that I studied enough. Certainly, everyone’s different, but generally, symbolic logic isn’t the kind of class that a lot of philosophy majors fail in, even if many of them find the experience uncomfortable. There’ll be points where, at first, you think you can’t do it, but it honestly is easier than it looks, for the most part. Certain symbols are used to represent certain concepts in language and logic. The tilde sign, ~, that you see next to the letter B in step two of the problem simply means “not.” It negates whatever statement it’s attached to, and letters are often used to represent statements. It’s strange at first and it’s so foreign only because most people have never taken classes like it before, but the material is mostly intuitive to grasp from my experience. Harder subjects in symbolic logic, like proofs, require practice and extra studying, but are not insurmountable at all.
I ended up getting an A in that symbolic logic class with a decent, but not insane amount of studying, and I’m absolutely awful at math.
If you’d like to learn more about this subject, I recommend this: http://philosophy.lander.edu/logic/symbolic.html
It’s a free and great resource that I think you’ll benefit from greatly. Good luck, and if you have any more questions, feel free to ask.