le and el?

So I'm taking Spanish this semester and let me tell you, Spanish is a beautiful language but it completely freaks me out with its grammar and vocabularies.

I was just flipping my textbook and ran into this confusion between le and el.
According to the book, "el es" means he is. But google translator and spanishdict say "el" is "the"? But what about "le"?

doesn't "el es" actually mean "The is"? And "le es" means "he is"?

Como se llama ella?

why use "se" instead of "es"?

se means herself right?

"El" and the femenine "Ella" are pronouns.

"El" es un republicano estupido. - He is a stupid republican.

Now "El" also means "the" as n the article that goes before nouns.

El arbol es verde - the tree is green

Hope this helps!

Yes, on your previous question "se" implies on herself... literally it would be something like

"how does she calls herself"

Haha you are right Spanish is hard!

Wow, thank you. This is very helpful!! You explained it so well

Anytime!

''le'' is used prior to an action...I don't know the right term for this kind of word, but spanish is very correct. There are rules for all this kind of usage...it's just a matter of learning the rules and you'll be set.

''le voy a pegar a ese cabron(a)''. I'm gonna hit that asshole (m or f). 'le' may also follow the word implying action as in 'voy a pegar-le a ese cabron'. Same as above but note how 'le' became part of pegar. Pegar in this case is not really a verb (that would be 'voy' (gonna)...in which case as in english 'hit/pegar' is not really the verb in this instance). Again, pegar becomes a sort of word that has its proper descriptive in grammar, but I can't recall what that is.

'le' also means the action to be performed is on someone/something if that helps any...in this case the asshole is getting the beat down. It would be wrong to just say 'voy a pegar a ese cabron' which takes on a whole different meaning (mostly because pegar has other definitions.

This example is not the best I admit, since 'voy a golpear a ese cabron' does not use 'le' in it and means exactly the same as above.

as johan pointed out, 'el' and 'ella' are pronouns, and may be used to describe things as well if they are 'female or male'. As in german, things take on an 'implied' gender, and some are
non-gender. In johan's case 'El arbol' is male, 'La estufa/the stove' is female and 'el agua or la agua/water' is non-gender.

This may be confusing but simplifies things quite a bit since you don't have to learn what a 'thing is or is not'. The rules will say for example ...those things ending in 'o' are males and those ending in 'a' are female...i'm sure there are more rules for this and exceptions (after all agua ends in 'a' and 'arbol' ends in 'l')

We don't really have a 'the'...the closest for that is 'eso, ese, or esa'. Eso, ese or esa are closer to 'that'. 'pasame esa chingadera' pass me that fucking thing.

I'm not sure if anyone has pointed out that Él (as in the pronoun He) does contain a little accent over the vowel whereas El (The) does not.

I'm not sure that's right. Isn't El w/ana accent referring to when you explicitly refer to him? As in..."Fue el!"<w/accent

Again, I've forgotten most rules so I may not be right in this case