Author of books, comics, games, and screen-plays. Also part-time journalist and translator.
Resident of Vienna, Austria.
Mostly I specialize in strange and fun stuff. As shows my bibliography. One non-fiction book called “Weird Vienna” is available in English.
Actually, in many cases, no. German just uses fewer spaces. Let me explain.
For instance, if you want to meet somebody at a parking lot of a shopping mall located at Main Street, you might say, “Hey, let's meet at the Main Street shopping mall parking lot.” (Probably you wouldn't but you could.) Seems innocuous, but actually everything after "at" is just one word!
In German, one might say “Treffen wir uns am Hauptstraßeneinkaufszentrumsparkplatz.” (Which rarely somebody would, but they could.) This means word by word exactly the same as the English version! It's just more honest in a grammatical sense because what de facto is one word is now really one written word. Moreover, the sentences rather sound the same as an English speaker wouldn't make spoken pauses where in the written form spaces are used.
Other languages, especially Romance languages like French, would say something like “Let's meet at the parking lot of the shopping center located at Main Street”. In this case, you would have three* distinct words in a clear grammatical order. (*Parking lot, shopping center and Main Street are composite words to begin with.)
So, by gluing words together, German just makes visible what's grammatically there. While English hides those linguistic facts by using spaces or hyphens.
This makes German words sometimes look like endless worms, but on the flip side you just can chop them up and then you will find it rather easy to decode them.
