I can read about two thirds of the sentence in German. I also gravitated toward languages but never really learned any well enough to use it. I can almost carry on a conversation in Spanish, but "almost" is probably an exaggeration. I had three college semesters of German, one of French and three weeks of Russian. Enough to get a little flavor of them all.
No, I didn't read the back of Magister Ludi either. Steppenwolf was a cult book for my generation.