Thanks for the replies everyone.

You were asking for tense in chinese i think Simply put some words before thought like 原来， 之前，已经，曾经 for example 我原来以为， 我之前认为， 我原来想， 我还以为， Sometime， might has slightly difference between the meaning , but each of them could work. I found out that my poor German gives some horrible effection on my english, now i feel like i am going to end with mess up both of them . bah.

in sentence "I wish i had thought of that earlier" ,我应该早点想到的。or 我应该早考虑到的 or 我应该早预料到的。 thought means "think of " “consider of”“predict ”=想到xiang dao。考虑到 kao lv dao。预料yu liao in sentence "I had thought Chinese was becoming easy... until I discovered I needed to learn traditional characters!" I had thought means "我原以为"“我原本以为”“我原来以为”。 “原本”“原来” may use “原” for short. "原“means ”before， “以为”means"thought"

Two same phrases, I think

First of all, chinese is different from english in terms of grammar logic, you can not just find direct translation that connects a sentence pattern in english and a corresponding sentence pattern in chinese. However, i think you are looking for "我原本以为。。。，但是现在我发现(事实)是这样的。。。" to "i thought" and "在这（现在的情况）之前我一直以为。。。" to "i had thougt" Again, above are just one of many ways to express the same thing, there is no fixed sentence pattern, what you have to understand is to use the correct adverbs and verbs to let people know what the real meanning behind your words, but not a correct pattern.