> it's amazing that a language which makes noun phrases into words has a specific word for this concept we express as a noun phrase.

How are you distinguishing english "noun phrases" from german "words"? Being spelled with a space doesn't mean much, and english compound nouns don't generally get separated.

edit, some examples of what I'm talking about:

"throw away", in the sense "discard", what you do with garbage, is a word from a lexical perspective (a lexeme): it requires its own lexical entry, and is unrelated to the similar-looking construction "throw away" with the sense "without necessarily moving, use a violent arm motion to impart velocity to an object, causing that object to move away from oneself".

But "throw away" [discard] is definitely not a word at the syntactic level, it is two: other words can appear between the "throw" token and the "away" token, as in I had him throw it away.

The clitic 's of He's going to have a hard time later is also a word at the lexical level (exactly equivalent to is), and at the syntactic level (because it can be freely used basically anywhere, preceded and followed by any other words). But at the phonological level, it isn't; 's is a (usually) zero-syllable construction phonologically dependent on the preceding word, and unlike a normal word, it has no pronunciation in isolation (that would be difficult to manage in zero syllables).

It's easy to construct compound nouns such as "garage door opener" in English, and (I believe; I have almost no knowledge of German) easy to construct compound nouns that look like "garagedooropener" in German. It's never been obvious to me that those two phenomena differ in anything except their spelling, hardly a fundamental feature of a language. Once we've constructed the compound "garage door opener", it's very rare to manipulate it in any way we wouldn't be comfortable doing if it were all one big spaceless word -- in particular, other words won't appear between the "garage", "door", and "opener" tokens.

If pressed, my personal opinion would be that "garage door opener" is a noun phrase in English, and the analogous construct is also a noun phrase in German, even if it's spelled without spaces. But I'd welcome somebody else's informed opinion.

My takeaway from a couple of years of linguistics is that you're completely correct. Both English and German form compound nouns in the same way. It's a typographic difference more so than anything else -- modern English defaults to separating compounds with a space, German typography just doesn't allow for that.

As English compounds get more entrenched, they tend to be hyphenated -- which German also allows for, occasionally -- and then fused.

Extremely long compound nouns are rare in both languages, mostly, I'd think, because they get conceptually unwieldy. It's easier (I would argue/guess) to understand a sentence talking about what the captain of the Danube steamship company did than a sentence about what the Danube steamship company captain did. Both utterances are noun phrases and have practically the same meaning.

It's still possible that German and English speakers differ in the way they use compound nouns -- e.g. how often they use compounds instead of paraphrasing them or how spontaneously they form new, unfamiliar compounds.

garage door opener would be translated to Garagentoröffner or Garagentüröffner. (door = Tür or Tor, depending on context, opener = Öffner).