Not a specialist, but the complex grammar of German tends to carry more information than English, which draws on a much larger vocabulary but flattened a formerly complex grammar into more words to say the same.
Real languages exist somewhere on a spectrum. Languages in the Indo-European family show an empirical historical tendency to become less synthetic and more analytic over time and via contact with other languages. German is more synthetic than English, but less synthetic than Russian, and much less synthetic than very old IE languages such as Vedic Sanskrit. English is more analytic than German, but less analytic and more synthetic than Afrikaans. Some non-IE languages such as Finnish are extremely synthetic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language
Based on the description I would classify Afrikaans as synthetic, not analytic.
Afrikaans has an origin as a pidgin Dutch spoken by slaves and other lower classes. Afrikaans speakers can communicate effortlessly with Dutch and Flemish speakers for example. Our grammar is decidedly germanic and we make use of morphemes in stead of separate words.
Held: hero Heldjie: diminutive hero Helde: plural
Heldin: female hero Heldinnetjie: diminutive female hero Heldinne: plural
Although it should be noted that explicit female versions of nouns is falling out of favour to some degree.
English and Afrikaans still have remnants of grammatical gender and case, but it's not really enough to be considered a prominent feature of the language.
Within the Indo-European family that includes Latin and Sanskrit, the empirical historical process seems to have been that the Proto-Indo-European language was highly synthetic, and as time went on, less synthetic daughter languages such as Latin and Sanskrit developed from it by degrees. These in turn gradually developed by degrees into even less synthetic / more analytic daughter languages (Italian, Hindi, etc.)
Why this happened is an open theoretical question. Pidginization (which would roughly correspond to 'lack of isolation'), and/or phonetic changes that impacted discernment of synthetic features are leading candidates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language
>>For example, Mandarin Chinese has many compound words, giving it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, but since it has almost no inflectional affixes at all to convey grammatical relationships, it is a very analytic language.
She said that, as spoken, information density is fairly similar from language to language. Languages that express the same information using more phonemes tend to be spoken using more phonemes per unit of time, and it what (in some circumstances though not all) can contribute to the perception that people speaking in one language speak much faster.
I suppose that might not help much when the issue is writing though, or any circumstance where phonemic production is at a fixed rate regardless of language.
Languages with denser information are spoken slower. Vice versa.
As an aside, German also relies heavily on modal verbs (nearly as much as English does), far more than even related languages such as Spanish. There are many distant or unrelated languages with more informative verb conjugations/inflections.
One thing that provides a lot of contextual information in German are the inflections and suffixes, i.e.
"Köchin" - female cook
"Koch" - male cook
"Köchchen" / "Köchle" ... - diminuitive cook
"Kochs" - possessive / "the cook's ..."
etc.
I'd be pretty shocked if a German speaker thought a tortoise had a Schild or really was a Kroete, in the same way I'd be shocked if an English speaker said that a bush baby was an actual baby. Non-compositional noun compounds occur in both languages.
For example, the longest Czech word: Nejnezdevětadevadesáteroznásobovávatelnějšími = [do something] by those most not multipliable by 99.
Capital is short for capital city.
Vacuum is also short for vacuum cleaner.
I'll grant you Aussehen - that's a single word in english. But longer than the German one.