After the success of my first published book, "Guidebook to Japan: What the other guidebooks won't tell you," I am now ready to start my second book, "Learning Japanese: What the textbooks won't tell you." Allow me to share with you the Conditioned Response Method (CRM). With this method, you will be speaking excellent Japanese by the end of this column.

CRM is a method of learning Japanese through conditioned responses to Japanese situations. I came up with this method after two observations in Japan: 1. That students were taught English by having to memorize grammatical English phrases; and 2. That one of the most disappointing things about learning Japanese is that once you finally understand it, you realize no one is saying anything important anyway. Ditto kanji. Somehow after all that work to learn kanji, you expect it to say something important. Instead, you spend all that time learning kanji only to be able to read signs that say, "No parking or you'll be towed!" or "Don't litter, you scumbag!"

Back to the first observation, it has long been known that Japanese students have a history of unsuccessfully learning English by memorizing phrases out of context. That doesn't mean, however, that Japanese cannot be learned this way. This is because Japanese is far more predictable than English. Part of learning Japanese is learning how to react appropriately to situations.