kc says: all characters starting with k can be changed into other sounds with punctuation marks. the dashes change the characters so they start with g. kc says: when combined with a little (lower-case) character you compress the sounds of the two characters, making new (more rarely used) characters; pronounced as shown. only the characters shown here can be compressed in this way.
examples - kana (means 'native japanese characters')
- kanji (means 'chinese style characters')