No. The claim belongs among the rumours that readers of Hegel copy from one another, and it has kept more than a few from starting at all. It is expressly listed in the teaching literature as one of the prejudices that make a fair reading impossible.
What is right about it
Hegel’s concepts acquire their full meaning only in context, and one understands an early paragraph better on a second reading because one now knows what it is leading to. But that holds for any demanding book. It does not mean that nothing can be understood beforehand; it means that repeated reading pays.
What is wrong about it
The Groundlines are not built so that the sense only clicks into place at the end. They are a course, and each section has for itself an object one knows: property, contract, punishment, family, the market, poverty, the courts, the constitution. One can read and understand § 244 on the rabble without having studied the Logic. One can read § 100 on punishment and test one’s own theory of punishment against it.
The price is that one does not read the grounding along with it — why the rabble stands just here, why punishment is treated in abstract right and not in the state. That is a real loss, but no reason not to begin.
A recommendation
Read first what concerns you. A lawyer sensibly begins with property and punishment, someone interested in economics with civil society, someone thinking about politics with the state. And leave the Preface aside for now: it is famous, it is polemical, and as a way in it could hardly be less suitable. One reads it at the end — in which there is a certain irony, for in that very preface Hegel warns against trying to get at a philosophy through its preface.
Literature. Robert C. Solomon, „Teaching Hegel“, Teaching Philosophy 2 (1977) – against the myth that in Hegel one understands nothing before one has understood everything.