The most important feature of German that I strongly miss in English (and probably other languages, too) is the easiness that one can make new words (in particular nouns) by juxtaposition (and indeed, importantly, you can often rely on the fact that more complicated words are constructed this way). I really wish a lot more English words were built by juxtaposition from more simple concepts instead of being own words that one has to learn without (easily) being able to understand the "atoms" that the word is built of.

Some of smsm42's example do have this property:

"Eigenwert" (eigenvalue): eigen (of (it)self), Wert (value)

"Weltschmerz": Welt (world), Schmerz (pain)

"Poltergeist": poltern (to rumble), Geist (ghost)

Mandarin Chinese does much the same as German.

English prefers to borrow words from other languages. Curiously, it has borrowed hardly any words from Mandarin Chinese.

> English prefers to borrow words from other languages. Curiously, it has borrowed hardly any words from Mandarin Chinese.

Besides that there had been much less contact between English speaking countries and China than to, say, German, French or Spanish speaking countries (at least until the Chinese economy began to boom) there is another reason that I can imagine. Since the Chinese dialects/languages are tonal languages their sound is much more foreign to the ear of people who didn't grew up with a tonal languages. Indeed people who learnt to speak one of the Chinese dialects told me one of the first exercises is learning to even consciously perceive the different tones.

Yes, probably down to historical lack of contact. I don't think that tones are part of the reason. There has been somewhat more borrowing from Cantonese into English, e.g. ketchup, dimsum, kumquat, and cheongsam, and substantial borrowing from Chinese into Japanese and Korean. The tones are simply dropped.

English had all of these, exactly.

Every child knows poltergeist, from Harry Potter. Every teenager knows angst.

The others are less universal, but I'd expect a university graduate to know them.

That's kind of the point - English imported them from German (or, rather, just uses German words). English does that all the time. Same with French - rendezvous, cachet (don't confuse with cache :), passé, etc. So French speakers shouldn't feel bad for taking words from English - that happens all the time, just this time English is more popular so other languages take from it. Before that it was German and French, and in 100 years maybe it will be Mandarin, who knows.

Where exactly do you think those words come from?