You can make the description even easier (newbie friendly)

First, you'll have to understand what a Fork is (in the crypto terms). You have your original Blockchain - it goes forward in one direction. Forking (Hard or Soft) then splits the chain up.

If you HardFork, you create a new chain that has the history of the original chain, but the two chains are no longer compatible with each other.
A very good example is Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, they share the same history, however at a certain point in time, they split up and became two unique coins. It's then down to miners and the community what chain they wish to support.

A Softfork would be when you have a change to the code, but the new version is still compatible with the old version, look at segwit on Bitcoin for an example.

This is a very simplistic explanation, if you want to learn more then google is your friend, there are an insane amount of articles that explain this in a lot more detail