About the awkwardness of the NEI keys – yes. In the beginning most of us feel this way. That's how Colemak feels in some cases. But that isn't something bad or damaging, it's just different. After some practice you'll learn to coordinate your fingers better and not having any problems with these. Same goes for EI/IE and  RS/SR – a very often mistake for Qwerty users, switching to Colemak.

The SC isn't a very nice one, I can see. You could try to type the C with your index finger. Depending on your typing style that could be very easy or... not very so :). I think switching R and S won't help much about this. Try hitting R with the ring finger and C with the middle – not very comfortable. If you use the index finger it's a little better but not that much to be a deciding factor for the R-S swap.

About how it will change the typing in English and if it will be more comfortable in German I can't comment.

Let me know if any of this doesn't make much sense and I'll try to explain myself more clear ;)

I don't see any problem with the FR on the "standard" Colemak. FS (same finger) isn't hard to do but it's same finger, which will slow you down when you get to higher speeds. I'll look into the comparison of the English stats for the RS and SR versions of Colemak and will come back.

Edit: As far as the in- and outward rolls are concerned (for English language), there is almost no difference (very slightly worse after the change). Finger load, no problems.

A slight problem could be when it comes to same finger ratios. After the change the same finger ratio for the left Ring finger raises a little bit (from 0.18% to 0.46%), and also slightly for the Middle finger (with 0.1%). The overall increase is from 3.95% to 4.33%. Doesn't look like a lot.

The digraph WS is about 0.03% of all the digraphs (which is the same for WR) but this one isn't hard to type since it's Upper row → Home row. The more damaging one is SW which is about the same 0.03% compared to RW – 0.01%.

These numbers don't seem very high, even knowing that same finger digraphs are one of the things that interrupt your flow the most. I'd say if the benefits in German are better than the loss in English, go for it.

Note: all the numbers I'm using are from data I've gathered and combined from different places and an excel spreadsheet layout analyzer I'm using. It was initially made by BvoFRak (who I'm very grateful for) and I got the idea and rebuilt it to my liking while using my data and adding features and design ideas I liked. If you'd like to look at it, I will send it to you.

If you have some statistics about German language (it shouldn't be very hard to find), you can edit it around, so it works for German, as well as English. Currently I've made it for English and Bulgarian (my native language).

Hey, thanks for your comments!

@DreymaR: If I understand you correctly, this would mean that 'SC' is like querty-'DX', after the shift of ZXCVB, right? Don't think my keyboard does allow the kind of "sliding" that would be required ...

@pafkata90: I found some useful statistics for the german language (and others) here:

http://www.sttmedia.de/silbenhaeufigkeiten

But after some playing around with the S/R question, I no longer think it is worth it to exchange them; not the least because I like the "ST" roll (1.29 % freq.!), as a counterpart to the "IE" (2.1 %) and "EN" (4.9 %) motions - I would miss that ...

So for now I'll just go with the "masses" ;-) and practice with the "standard" layout (even right now, but slooooowly ...)

I'll have to think later about what to do with äöüß... vs [\]{}... - after gaining some hold on the 26 letters, that is.

On a normal working day, I may well use more brackets than Umlaute (äöü) - I work as a software developer.

In fact, I just exchanged my german keyboard at work for an US-layout for this reason, and that started me thinking about the alphabet layout too ...

On the other hand, writing longer texts in german using the standard dead keys of the Colemak layout seems rather tedious to me.

Maybe a workable solution would be to have the regular national keyboard rearranged to Colemak (ie the 26 letters), and then place the []{}\| stuff on convenient positions of the AltGr-level for the *left hand*.

In the alternate layout, the six characters []{}\| would be on the äöü keys again, in the same locations as in a US keyboard.

(The different placement of the symbols in US and DE has nothing to do with Colemak, of course.)

Hmm.