Do not knock English for various words that are missing. Including words borrowed from other languages, it has well over twice the words of any other language.
Not quite. Chinese has just as rich a word stock. Since it's an analytic language people argue over the definition of a "word." But a quick inspection of the Fenn Five Thousand, a student dictionary considered to cover only an elementary vocabulary, shows an average of no fewer than five compounds for every root-word or morpheme. This means that every literate person is presumed to be familiar with 25,000 words. Counting
han zi (kanji) that only scholars know, there are something like 75,000 single-syllable morphemes. At only two compounds each this would put Chinese modestly ahead of English. Adding in the explosion of new words both languages had to coin during the 20th Century, it's anybody's guess. But in my opinion Chinese and English have no serious competition for being the world's most adaptable and expressive languages.
And I give the vote to Chinese because it does it all without borrowing from other languages, something which is virtually impossible due to phonetics. Constructions like
wei ta ming, "only it heals," for "vitamin," are so rare they would probably all fit on one page. The practice whose name escapes me, of following the formation pattern of another language using one's own vocabulary, is so much easier:
shi you, "stone oil," for "petroleum" from the same words in Greek and Latin;
dian hua, "electric speech," for "telephone," not quite the same formation as our Greek coinage but just as good.
Some languages have to say not so fast instead of go slower.
Someone recently posted a translation of a news article from his native language into English. They had used the awkward construction, "make [something] fall from his hand," suggesting that the original language has no word for "drop."
English is richer than most (all other?) languages in words for various colors
In Spanish, you have to say
color de café, "coffee-colored," for such a basic color as brown.
Red seems to have been the earliest color name adopted by our tribal ancestors. Many of the Indo-European languages have a word beginning with R, inherited from a common source named after the rose.
Some languages have a large set of words for family relationships. Hebrew and some Semitic languages have words for mother’s brother, father’s older brother, father’s younger brother, and other relationships requiring a phrase in English & most other languages.
In Chinese, "older brother" and "older sister" are different morphemes than "younger brother" and "younger sister." Agglutinated with the morpheme for "cousin," they indicate "older male cousin," "younger female cousin," etc. The morpheme for "son" is easily agglutinated with a numeral to show the order of birth. Am I the only one old enough to have seen those quaint, racist Charlie Chan detective movies in which he kept refering to his "number one son"? That is just a literal translation of the more logical syntax of Chinese, like "Chinaman" and "Chinatown."
Note that some of these words are due to various customs. For example: In some cultures, a father’s older brother has authority over you.
In Chinese, your mother's mother is "external grandmother," your grandmother from outside the family.