Use of wp_get_archives or wp_list_pages

I’m not sure if I am posting this here properly, if not my apologies.

I am an inexperienced WordPress user and generally have little knowledge of making websites etc. However, I want to add a list of the last 5 posts posted on the website to the homepage. I have tried to find a way to do this but whenever I find pages like http://codex.wordpress.org/wp_list_pages or http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_get_archives they make zero sense to me whatsoever. I don’t know what to do with all the coding and it would be really useful if someone could help.