As a native German speaker, I think it's fair to say that German is a comparatively poorly designed* language. It has too many needless concepts. I envy Chinese and Japanese; I feel like these languages have got it almost right. If they eliminated measure words, they'd probably be as perfect as a language can reasonably be.
* I know languages aren't "designed" for the most part, but I find it helpful to compare them as if they were.
Measure words in Chinese are great. They provide so much descriptive capacity in such a short simple way. 一棍棒, 一把棒, 一根盪, 一條棒, all would translate to English as "a stick", but they convey different perspectives about what that stick is. I can appreciate the frustration with learning words that only have one specific measure word that only really describes it, but even then you can honestly get away with 個.
> I envy Chinese and Japanese;
Up until the point you have to read and write them.
Especially written Japanese, which is a giant mess of stuff they borrowed from the west, china as well as native stuff.
At least with traditional Chinese, reading isn't as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of characters are pictophonetic characters(形聲), where one element describes the sound and the other meaning. While not perfect they allow a reader to guess with decent accuracy the meaning and pronunciation of a character they have never seen before.