Hegel is weird because for example with Heidegger, who is also notoriously incomprehensible to non-German speakers, once you internalize his special terminology he's clear as day. Well, he's clear for the first half of Being and Time -- I defy anybody to understand the second part, which he didn't even want to publish. But with Hegel it doesn't help. You still wind up in the middle of half-page long sentences having gotten so completely lost you have to restart the entire chapter just to get back where you were.
It's like he perfected the philosophical equivalent of the brown noise. You can feel your brain running so fast and hard it just gives up and sh-ts right there in the middle of your consciousness, and now you have a head full of poo and you can't even remember where you are or, more importantly, why the fuck you ever started this.
One of life's true consolations though is even people who have read him for twenty years say the same thing. It actually is genius, and it changed the world more than any philosopher since Plato -- we only think like we do now because of him. But you can really only live it -- the sheet music is impossible.
