What is the difference of physics meaning (for beginner) between the Ricci tensor $R_{\mu\nu}$ and the scalar curvature $R$ terms ?
Wikipedia gives the same explanation for the two, as we could see below, so it does not help to understand the difference between the two:
In differential geometry, the Ricci curvature tensor, named after Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, represents the amount by which the volume of a narrow conical piece of a small geodesic ball in a curved Riemannian manifold deviates from that of the standard ball in Euclidean space
and
Specifically, the scalar curvature represents the amount by which the volume of a small geodesic ball in a Riemannian manifold deviates from that of the standard ball in Euclidean space