Yes, it is an alien language and while most languages keep pretty much to the standards there are differences. To translate it a bit-
'/^[_a-z0-9!#$%&~\{\}\-]{1,64}(\.[_a-z0-9!#$%&~\{\}\-]{1,64})*@[_a-z0-9\-]{1,63}(\.[_a-z0-9\-]{1,63})*(\.[a-z]{2,6})$/i'
The / at beginning and ends just sort of mark the string like quotes around a string variable. The i at the end ignores character case (upper/lower). The ^ represents the beginning of the string and $ the end, so all that they send must meet the format (if just ^ was used it would mean what they give starts with the format, etc). The [] areas represent chars and char ranges in that section of the format string with some special chars needing \ escaped. The {min, max} sections show how many characters from that group. The () just group sections further and sometimes can have other meaning or allow modifying a found group/section later. The () sections here are just used to further specify a count with the * which is 0 or more occurrences since not all emails contain a dot, but it is allowed. I used to have the last part of the string as (\.[a-z]{2,3}) which was for the top level domains like .net, .com, .edu, .au, .de, etc. There are some crazy domains lately though that can be up to like 11 chars, but I allowed for 2-6 in length to get the ones I care about and not leave it so open.