german2k01 wrote:However, where do you place books aimed at 8-12 years old?
Also, Posts/Answers on Quora? I always feel like reading posts in German there requires really high level of competence in the language.
Children's books are tricky. I' d say that books for 3-4 year-olds are A1-A2, and after that around school age there is a big jump to C1-C2 with little in between. If you're lucky (and interested in reading this type of books) you'll find one that fits your needs, but I wouldn't recommend children's book in general to any learner. A lot of people tend to forget when they talk about children in the context of language learning, that children go to school where they study their native language every day. After learning the letters they soon read and solve comprehension exercises and discuss extremely rare words, sometimes even new to me. The literature aimed at them also tends to have this educative goal, I guess. Children's books aimed at 7-8 year-olds are often full of archaic or dialectal words to widen children's scope of the language, and I'd say this can make them even C2. Also children's books can be full of non-existent, made-up words, partly to show children how to make fun with the language, partly to teach them the rules by which new elements can be created. For example, Hungarian is an agglutinative language, and made-up words teach the children the suffixes that make nouns from verbs. A language learner doesn't know whether or not a word truly exists, how widely it's used and what register it belongs to. But it's true that there are exceptions.
According to the CEFR informal, short texts are usually in the A1-A2 range. So although a Quora post can look difficult, it's usually short, so you have the possibility to look up the words in a dictionary. Moreover, they are grouped according to topics, which also helps, because there's a lot of recurring vocabulary. As we go up to the higher levels, texts usually become more formal and much longer. An A1-A2 text in a common course book is 4-5 sentences, not more. The first (abridged) article arrives at B1. Nevertheless, no-one is prohibited to write a long scientific article (B1-B2) or even a treatise (C1) on quora, so again, there are exceptions to the rule.
About reading without studying grammar: it's totally possible to read with little grammar study. It's very hard to speak in a proper, educated way without grammar. Moreover, popular fiction often has an extremely low level on language, and it has absolutely no educative goal contrary to children's books. It's designed to be an easy way to kill time for the masses, entertainment without effort. I really believe that a lot of popular fiction is B1, so can be read with a very basic grammar knowledge, especially if the language is relatively easy (not very distant and exotic) for the reader.