This is the commonest complaint about Hegel, and it touches a peculiarity that lies exactly the other way round from what one supposes. Hegel’s difficulty is not technical vocabulary. Technical vocabulary can be looked up. His difficulty is that he uses ordinary German words and, in context, gives them a meaning the dictionary does not supply.
The examples one comes to grief on
Wirklich, actual, does not mean „present at hand“ but: corresponding to its concept. Begriff, concept, does not mean a general representation but the inner structure of a thing. Aufheben, to sublate, means both at once: to do away with and to preserve. An sich, in itself, does not mean „really“ but: according to its potentiality, not yet actualized. Spekulativ, speculative, does not mean „unfounded“ but the opposite.
Each of these words can be read in its everyday sense without stumbling — and one then has before one a sentence that is false but free of contradiction. That is the real trap: one does not notice that one is wide of the mark.
In translation the difficulty is doubled. An English rendering has to choose one sense of a word that means two things at once, and the choice is often invisible on the page. That is why this edition states its choices: they are collected in the glossary, together with the German word behind each of them.
Why he does it
Hegel regards it as an advantage of the German language that it has „words which have a speculative meaning in themselves“ — words, that is, which already carry within them the thought that philosophy must laboriously develop. Aufheben is his model case. Where others introduce a coined term, he reaches for the existing one and lays bare what is in it.
For this he accepts being misunderstood, and does little about it. Hegel means everything exactly as he says it in each case, and hardly ever considers himself obliged to forestall possible misunderstandings; correct understanding follows, for him, from the system and the context. An author who meets his readers halfway he is not.
What helps
Three things. First: grow suspicious of every word that passes too easily in the sentence — it is precisely the inconspicuous ones that are the traps. Second: use the glossary, which for each of these expressions gives the supporting passage verbatim. Third: remember that the meaning grows in the course. What „freedom“ means in § 15 is less than what it means in § 260; Hegel takes the same word and fills it along the way.
Literature. Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, Oxford 1992 – the most usable reference work for exactly this problem; Robert C. Solomon, „Teaching Hegel“, Teaching Philosophy 2 (1977), who describes Hegel’s language not as technical but as underdetermined.