Even with short sentences, German and Japanese often have large DLM values.
With more complex, nested sentences (which are really common in Germany), this becomes more of an issue, because between two connected words you can have 7 subclauses.
(Seriously, read Karl Marx’ Das Kapital, or Günther Grass’ Der Krebsgang, or read any other German author.)
German, Japanese, etc. are just much less minimized than other languages like English and Indonesian. Working out why is the next step for us. I don't think it's because these languages are inherently harder to understand. They just represent different solutions to the communication problem.
The grammar of an average english article in a science magazine reads for me, a native German speaker, like first-grader text.
The grammar of an average english science magazine reminds me of German first-grader text.A nested sentence is a sentence structure, a combination of main sentences, which are sentences that could stand a lone, and a subclauses, which are clauses that are dependent on main sentences, in a specific way that allows for easier understanding, which is done by providing an explanation for a specific part in a subclause.
As you can see, this doesn’t really work well in english, but in German sentences actually become MORE readable if done like this.
Interestingly, there isn't any evidence that nonprojective dependencies are harder for people to understand than projective ones, so I wouldn't expect nonprojective arcs to be shorter on average than projective ones.
I think these old German and Japanese languages may have been hard to understand for outsiders, but were used with high sophistication (you have to invest energy to access this information) among insiders. For instance the Japanese pillow words / Makurakotoba or German words for hard to translate concepts like "Weltschmerz", "Kummerspeck" and "Torschlusspanik". All short, useful words for communicating complex rich concepts, provided the agent knows the meaning of these words.
Torschusspanik (sic!) - fear of quick commitment