The food is French, the animal is Anglo Saxon. At least English lacks compound words or whatever German calls those 30-character constructions.
Not entirely true. English, as any other Germanic language, still likes to compound words to produce a new meaning, the main difference is that, as opposed to most other Germanic languages, spaces are usually retained in writing. But this is just a spelling difference, the underlying process is the same.
Let's consider "scheepskapitein", "Schiffskapitän" and "ship captain". All three are formed the exact same way and mean roughly the same thing, but it's customary in Dutch and German to spell it without a space and in English it's considered correct to have a space in between. Note, that there are no spaces in speech, it's simply a writing convention. So, how many words are there in this example?
Sure, linguists can dissect everything and should, but how does the English laymen perceive it?
So surgery is full of -ectomies instead of -cut-outs.
I wonder do German brains work on a much longer context window because of the language?
b) the official title of the law was "Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung", so how again is it that English "gets to use a sentence" and German doesn't? German has the choice depending on context, sometimes having one word is convenient.
The composed word also has a specific meaning that the same words with space between doesn't. For example "das rote Kraut" – "red herb" and "das Rotkraut" – "red cabbage". Also suppose "red cabbage" was grown in abnormal conditions, so it doesn't have the color pigments, it is still "red cabbage", but not "red" "cabbage". This is awkward to state in English, but no problem in German.
Maybe, but more due to the spelling of numbers and long sentences. Compound words are not an example of this, since Germans can parse these words just fine as different things. It just means that the lowest "tokenization" in everyday use is not the word, but subcomponents of them.
Do English native speakers "tokenize" expressions in words? Do you see it as '(labelling) (of) (minced)' or '(label)l(ing) (of) (minc)(ed)' ?
I can't speak for most Germans, but the algorithm I think I use is just greedy from left to right. This is also consistent with how mistokenization in common puns works, so I think this is common.
In primary school we trained to recognize syllable boundaries. Is that just a German thing, or is this common in other countries? You need to know these for spelling and once you know these, separating word components becomes trivial.