Which sounds better (or is used more often) Pao sam niz stepenice i udario sam glavom o zid (I fell down the stairs and hit my head against the wall) OR Pao sam niz stepenice i udario sam glavom na zidu (I fell down the stairs and hit my head on the wall). Furthermore can protiv ever be used for "against" in this situation? EG "Pao sam niz stepenice i udario sam glavom protiv zida" (I kinda doubt this last part since I have never seen it used for anything but fighting and competitions, but I thought Id ask)

First off, feel free to speak to me as openly as you want. Even coming out and directly insulting me is not going to bother me, the list of stuff that will offend me is so small that it is unlikely you will hit upon it.

Despite having a God given talent to learn things much faster than than most people (sounds nice, but all natural talents come with a cost...) I have never learned another foreign language (though I know ABOUT several languages) (only studied Croatian for 3 months.) So I am much more willing to listen to someone that has learned multiple languages. I am fully aware that learning Croatian can not be approached as a strictly intellectual exercise because a lot of it is about learning a cultural style not strict rules.

There is a much longer explanation of why I need much more literal translations (right now), but without knowing a lot more about me it is hard to explain right now. The short answer is that right now I am categorizing as many (common) prepositions and finding all of their uses (+ the cases they are used in, I know most are G) Prepositions for the most part have pretty direct translations (or at least when rephrased into certain constructs). There are very few resources online that give detailed explanations of every preposition in Croatian, and even those that do, do not cite examples and whether or not it is common in every day speech, despite having a strong understanding of prepositions being a huge factor to strong understanding of many languages.

From another post and thanks to diisenthrall I knew many uses for protiv. I was pretty sure it was not used in this manner, but since it behaved as a preposition and had a similar meaning I threw it into the mix mostly for exclusionary purposes.

I do appreciate your help and I do agree with your statement. Given that verbs can have non-literal meanings constructs of adjectives can be formed that are not possible in English combined with a loose word order and an enclitic subject-object word structure, forming a word for word translation is not possible. Unfortunately, by and large prepositions have a singular meaning or a shifted constructed meaning in most languages, and so literal translations of prepositions really are needed.