lol, yes Hal can be a pain to teach, you will see however that Zabaware has a new version that will be released in full later in the summer. You should add these comments to the beta testing area.
Having said that you could also check out the posts people have made on teaching Hal which might help you with some of the things you are trying. You can use structures like IF statements to ram home some details, and improvement comes from repetition.
Bear in mind that Hal as released is a chatterbot and primarily acts as a lighthearted chat program, not a Nobel Prize winner in science! But, then again, if you wanted to make Hal do more or become smarter, then that route takes you down the road of programming the brain, or altering the existing brains.
If you want to 'hardwire' some word definitions then add to the trigger words in the brain editor. Also Hal already has the ability to get the definitions of words from it's inbuilt WordNet database - this is an area Zabaware has highlighted will be improved also in the next release.
You can ask Hal, 'what is a car for example'...
I hope that's some help.