Very much the case (I should point out that the idea that the words are superfluous is a subjective value judgement, of course). In the instance of French, it's a reticence of right-branching languages, which Latin-descended languages typically are, to form compound words directly, relying more often instead on prepositions to relate the words. There's some logic to this, as explained to me by a woman from Spain who said, "If a glass table is a table made of glass, what, then, is a coffee table...?" The brevity English and other Germanic languages tend to gain in this way comes at the risk of ambiguity.
German, for its part, tends to suffer from the opposite sin, one common to other left-branching languages... a Lego-like snapping together of elements into unwieldy (to English eyes) compound words, exacerbated by a reluctance (at least till fairly recently) to adopt concise foreign terms. English has traditionally been much more amenable than German to incorporating precise foreign words for new concepts. English has walked a fine compromise between these two traditions; a practice that has resulted in, as we've observed, a higher degree of brevity, as well as garnering it an unusually large vocabulary with a wide variety of synonyms and near-synonyms with subtle shades of meaning. Not that I want to pat English-speakers on the back for any of this; none of it was by design. It's just how the language evolved culturally.