In German, it's always necessary to use the Umlaut and not the variant with two letters. Ocurrences of the variant with two letters (like oe for ö, ue for ü, ae for ä) can be found on the internet and in technical/administrational contexts. Reasons can be: - people are writing with keyboards from non-German countries that don't have the Umlaute - technical systems like email-adresses, administration, databases etc. don't support the Umlaute I hope your question has been answered. :)

Its okay to type schoen, cuz not every computer has the umlaut option.

In case you don't already know, you can set your keyboard to use the German layout. I have mine so i can hot swap between the us-English layout and German layout. To do so in windows (win7, but I think its the same or similar in other versions) go to the control panel and click 'Region and Language'(or if in category view its 'change keyboards or other input methods' under clock, language and region). Then click on the 'Keyboards and languages' tab and click the 'Change keyboards' button. In the Installed services area click the 'add' button and you can select which ever keyboard layout you want (in this case German). Then go to the "advance key settings" tab highlight one of the languages and click 'change key sequence' to set up how you want to tell windows to use the layout. I personally have the English layout as ctrl+shift+9 and the German one as ctrl+shift+8 so in mere seconds I can change them on the fly. [ becomes ü, ; becomes ö, ' becomes ä and - becomes ß (assuming you are also using an US key layout) Hope this was useful info!

it is ok... but only if you are not able to write ö,ü,ä..because of the keyboard you use.. If you write by hand or your keyboard can write ö,ü,ä then you should do it. :) So, officialy it is wrong, but a possibility if there is no other option the use the right letter.