To prepare for business trip to Morocco next week, I suddenly got in the mood of studying French, and I downloaded "Pimsleur Quick and Simple French for English Speakers" from Audible.com.
It is amazingly well planned program and after finishing eight 30-minute lessons, I manage to do some French conversations! The method is to repeat after CD, modify and repeat, without using textbook or grammatical terms.
Regarding the Japanese school system of studying English, it was just the technique of decrypting and encrypting the foreign language using grammar to the key. No way Japanese are not good at English conversation.