The paper by examining the performance of novice students who study Japanese as one of their second languages through traditional and modern approaches, namely the Yakudoku method and the Montessori approach. The study will seek to find out whether the two approaches can be combined to enhance student performance on sentence formation. It was a quantitative pretest posttest design and the participants were adult learners of the Japanese language as beginners. The findings indicate a mean growth of 28 percent among student scores, which implies that the mixture of conventional and newer techniques may be able to lead to greater student scores. More studies on a greater number of students must still be conducted, though, before a more valid comparison is made with other teaching techniques.