you can switch between using keyboard input and word banks (at least on desktop)

and you only need level 1 of something to move on to the next lesson.

Yes, that's true. But level 1 doesn't force you to write in the target language - the real value is in the last level. You can go through the level 1 of all lessons relatively quickly, but you won't be actually learning.

Thanks. I wasn't aware of the distinction between the levels as I'm running them all up to five since Japanese is so completely foreign to me.

The Japanese course seems to be hated by the reddit crowd for learning the language, but it's been very beneficial to me. At least one reason is that if I stuck to writing the language in a workbook my progress on the language would be glacial. I would physically be able to write the characters better but would know a lot less of the language.