This reminds me of an old Russian joke. A Soviet factory has six fireplaces and only one fireplace poker; rather than carrying the poker around every time they need to use it, they decide that they should get five more so that they can keep one at each fireplace.
At this point you need to understand a big of Russian grammar. As mentioned in the link, Russian has different forms for -ending-in-1 numbers, -ending-in-2-through-4 numbers, and -ending-in-5-through-9 numbers. Also, the third set of plurals are often irregular.
This being a Soviet factory, the requisition for fireplace pokers needs to be sent with all the correct paperwork to the bureaucracy. A debate arises: What is the appropriate plural for kocherga? Send the form out with the wrong word, and the wrath of the Soviet bureaucracy will fall upon them.
After arguing back and forth for a while, an old janitor hears the conversation and proposes a solution: Send in a requisition asking for three kochergi and two more kochergi. A few months later, they get their fireplace pokers along with a note: "Here are the four kochergi and one more kocherga which you requested."
In Japanese (which i don't speak, and only know a tiny bit about), counts of objects are always formed using a number, a noun, and an appropriate "counter". AIUI, a bit like how in English we say "three pieces of paper" or "two pairs of trousers" rather than "three papers" or "two trousers", only it's for almost everything:
The counters often apply to classes of things, like "small animals", "long, thin items", "liquids", "flat items", "sitting occasions", etc. For example, i would guess pokers would use 本, 'pon'.
Every noun uses one of the counters, there are lots of them, they all carry a shade of meaning, and some of them are pretty obscure. Hence, there is also humour around them. I remember a Japanese-speaking friend explaining how she'd told someone that she had seen three rabbits on the road, but rather than using the normal counter for small animals, she used the one for flat things, because they were roadkill.
The factory workers didn't know what the right word was for 5 fireplace pokers was -- only the forms for one or 2-4. So to avoid having to guess (and possibly getting it wrong) they made their request in a convoluted way.
The bureaucrats didn't know what the correct plural form was either, so their reply is similarly odd.
Basically, a lot of Russians have no idea how to say 5 pieces of kocherga. Factory workers think they can't spell it because they are just uneducated, but the reply they get suggests that the management has no idea either. Honestly, I couldn't say it myself before I looked it up when writing this reply, even though I've heard the joke before. The word is untypical.
Is there any significance to the fact that management divided the pokers 4+1 instead of 3+2? If I was trying to gloss over the fact that I couldn't say "5 pokers", I'd be pretty happy to have the excuse to just match what it said on the requisition form.
Something like "You requested 3 kochergi and 2 more kochergi. Here they are."
"Just" looking it up occurred to me too, but that table doesn't help if you don't also point out that for some reason it's entry for the genitive plural that we're looking for.
Numbers ending with 2-4 (except for 12-14) put the noun in singular genitive case in Russian. 5-10, on the other hand, require a plural noun (also in genitive). Since plurality is not regular and plural cases are even less so, some people will have trouble with deriving the correct plural case for some words. Something similar to some English speakers sometimes being confused about plural for Greek and Latin origin words ("forums"/"fora", "viruses"/"virii" etc.).
relates to the topic of declension in Russian.
In English, there's only 2 forms - e.g. 1 cookie, but N cookies (where N>=2). Imagine that for 3 cookies you would have something special again, like 3 cookises, and so on. In Russian, the word "kocherga" has quite intuitive forms for 1, 2, 3, 4, but when it comes to 5, our intuition breaks down, because the word is unlike any other, so it's difficult to reason by analogy. (This word is really a special case; normally, it's very easy to find the right ending). That's why they chose to put it as 3 kochergi+2 kochergi - just to be on the safe side (BTW, grammatically correct form would be "5 kochereg", which sounds really funny for a native Russian speaker)
At this point you need to understand a big of Russian grammar. As mentioned in the link, Russian has different forms for -ending-in-1 numbers, -ending-in-2-through-4 numbers, and -ending-in-5-through-9 numbers. Also, the third set of plurals are often irregular.
This being a Soviet factory, the requisition for fireplace pokers needs to be sent with all the correct paperwork to the bureaucracy. A debate arises: What is the appropriate plural for kocherga? Send the form out with the wrong word, and the wrath of the Soviet bureaucracy will fall upon them.
After arguing back and forth for a while, an old janitor hears the conversation and proposes a solution: Send in a requisition asking for three kochergi and two more kochergi. A few months later, they get their fireplace pokers along with a note: "Here are the four kochergi and one more kocherga which you requested."