The German layout actually has an extra key, which alters the layout around the enter button and creates a really tiny LShift. Which results in quite a few keys being not only mapped, but located differently. Mostly punctuation.
Interestingly, at my university, they supply an english-only OS in the computer pools to make it more accessible for international students from India, China and other countries, yet they still issue German keyboards.
I think your main problem is that you learned to type on English ones, though. Keys like tilde, backslash and pipe being behind the AltGr modifier are not bad if you learned to use that modifier, and dead keys only really matter for the caret, as other symbols that are also used as accent marks are pretty uncommon unless you do tons of SQL.