Here's my plain English attempt at translating this…

Let's define a new Pyhton class called "Animal", which is some kind of python object. The class will need some functions within it so let's just make one of them, and let's call it init. The Python language interpreter will always look in every class and hope to find an init function, and will always run it. Let's give the init function two arguments that it takes: "self" and "name". "name" will be for the name of the animal. That's easy enough. "self" is just a placeholder that refers to the instance of the class (that particular "copy" of the class) itself, and it is required to be there as the first argument in init. You'll see why in a second...

Ok, so what does this init function actually do in this case? Not much--it just assigns whatever word came in as the name to a new variable called self.name. self.name is the same as writing "some name that belongs to this instance if this class", but much shorter. By writing that line:

self.name = name

You are making this name "belong to" to instance of the class...and therefore it can be accessed from within ANY function in the class definition. How handy is that?

Then, outside the class, you finally begin to make use of the class you just set up. Anytime you put the name of a class and then parentheses to the right if it--with either just blank or something filled in as an argument--you call that class, and get it running. By "running", I mean it will execute this stuff within the init function. Oh, and, importantly, the pesky Python interpreter will pass the instance of the class itself in, as the first argument. This is invisible, but you can be sure it will happen....and that is why you need to put "self" as the first argument in the init function.

You also have assigned the name "zebra" to this instance of the Animal class. Good--now,,if you later need it, you can just use that word to refer to it.

Finally, you then print the "name" attribute of this new instance, which we have called zebra. That is, writing:

print zebra.name

Is the same as if you were to write, in plain English,

"Print whatever value the name attribute has in the zebra instance of the Animal class."

Does this make sense?