omae mona wrote:It seems to be a phrasebook to use while shopping. After staring at it for a while and thinking something seemed amiss, I realized the JNTO now seems to expect most English-speaking tourists can read kanji and hiragana.
I am more used to phrasebooks with romanized pronunciation guides
I'm guessing it is meant for people to point at rather than actually try to read/pronounce/mulch themselves. From that perspective it's actually a really good idea. Romanized Japanese often makes no sense at all and even in a best-case scenario it is still much more difficult to read than kanji/kana.