Then you are like almost everyone, and the cause is usually one of three.
First: you are reading assertions where movements stand
Hegel’s sentences are often not statements but interim positions. A concept is set out, shown at its limit, and in the process carried over into another. Whoever reads every sentence as a thesis collects theses that contradict one another — and is right to, for they are meant to contradict one another. The question is not „What is he asserting here?“ but „Where in the course am I, and where is it driving?“
Second: the pronouns
Hegel writes „this“, „that“, „it“, „the same“ in sentences where three antecedents are available. A tried remedy for this problem is mechanical: copy out the sentence and write above each pronoun the word that must be meant. In doing so one often notices that several are possible — and which one had unconsciously chosen while reading.
Third: the wrong standard for „understood“
The test of whether one has understood is not whether one can repeat the sentence. It is whether one can say it in one’s own words, words that do not sound like Hegel. Whoever expounds Hegel by hegeling does not know whether he has understood anything — this is a familiar finding in teaching and counts as the hardest didactic problem with this author.
What helps in practice
Read aloud. Short fixed periods rather than long sittings. Take notes in everyday language, without Hegel’s vocabulary. And drop the expectation of finishing a chapter on a first pass: practised readers too read the decisive passages several times. There is a commentator who needed 376 videos over nine years for the Phenomenology, one to four paragraphs per episode.
On this site the section „Hegel (plain)“ beneath many paragraphs also helps — a paraphrase in ordinary language. It is there for understanding and not for quotation.
Literature. Robert C. Solomon, „Teaching Hegel“, Teaching Philosophy 2 (1977) – there, reformulation in one’s own words as the only reliable test of understanding; Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, Oxford 1992.