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I was trying to translate a sentence into English the other day and was wondering what is the best way to put it.

In the sentence the speaker is telling that he had been on another opinion in the the first place but now he thought differently. I thought of three different ways of saying this, and am wondering if these three sentences mean the same? I also think that, at first is redundant in the third sentence.

  1. Oh, I would thought the same!
  2. Oh, I used to think the same!
  3. Oh, I used to think the same at first!
BM of Spadana
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    You can say As a teenager, I would visit* my grandmother every Sunday* OR ...I used to* visit..., where both are perfectly idiomatic and mean exactly the same. BUT whereas you can say Until I met you I used to think girls were soppy, you CAN'T idiomatically say Until I met you I would think girls were soppy. I'm not sure exactly how to "explain" that difference, but the long and short of it is your first option is syntactically completely invalid with past tense thought, but even if we change it to the syntactically "valid" think*, it's still not idiomatic. – FumbleFingers Nov 01 '21 at 13:05
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    Note that *at first* isn't necessarily completely redundant. You might be a pensioner talking about how you thought girls were "soppy" in your first term as a 13-year-old at a mixed-sex school - but by the second term (and for the rest of your life), you might have decided girls were "interesting". The *at first* there is a useful way of emphasising that you only had that negative opinion *for a relatively short initial period. But whatever the exact contextual meaning, at first* implies you changed your opinion *some time ago* (not within this conversation). – FumbleFingers Nov 01 '21 at 13:12
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    Do you mean would have thought in your first sentence? (If so, that's a bit different than used to think, but I don't want to just assume that for the answer) – Maciej Stachowski Nov 01 '21 at 14:33
  • So if I omit "would" and just say "I thought so at first" or "I used to think so at first" , both are correct? and both implies a same meaning? @FumbleFingers – BM of Spadana Nov 01 '21 at 15:04
  • @MaciejStachowski. What if I say "I had thought like you at first, but now have a different opinion" ? would it work? – BM of Spadana Nov 01 '21 at 15:09
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    had thought isn't ungrammatical, though it feels a bit off - Past Perfect is mostly used to refer to something before a certain point in the past (eg. I had thought* so until I met John), so it feels like you want to put focus on some event in the past that made you stop thinking so, but it's missing from the sentence. used to* puts more importance on the fact that you don't think so now. – Maciej Stachowski Nov 01 '21 at 15:28

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