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This is today's version of "Eskimos (Inuit, I know, but that's not how the memes went) have __40 __65 250( insert your number, it won't be wrong) words for snow. This is for the same reason and is now largely known as wrong.
The problem is even German people (I live in Germany) also believe that they have a larger more expressive language than (for example) English... When it isn't true. German has either 5.3 million++ words or 135,000 depending on how you count them. In reality you can endlessly combine words in German together, but it very rarely makes it a "new word".
This is also largely responsible for why more English words have a Romance root than a Germanic one. English's Germanic words tend to be counted as their base and get combined as phrases, while its Romance words are more likely to get double counted in compound words or variants of different forms being counted as separate words.
If you compare german non-compund words with their english translation the german words tend to do be a bit longer on average. I think the same also goes for the word-count in german sentences
English has more auxiliary words so I think in word count, English as more words in a sentence.
At least it's not the worst one. I'm looking at you french
Spanish, too. Translating things that you lay out, like flyers or handouts, from English to Spanish is a massive pain because you need to rearrange for all the additional text.