I know regular expressions can get kind of heavy; there is complexity to constructing expressions, performance can be a concern, there are different engines (DFA/NFA), etc... But when it comes to just using them to do some simple-to-complex searches, it's not hard...at all!
Below is a simple image that doesn't cover all of regex, but covers about 90% of the concepts you'll find yourself using. I find it odd that people need to use websites dedicated to helping them cheat at regex ("in plain English regex sites"). Just use regex directly, it iz not hard!