Which one is correct?
She is not as friendly as I thought.
She is not as friendly as I was thinking.
Both the past simple and the past continuous tense refer to an action made in the past. Which tense should I use in the examples above and why?
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She is not as friendly as I thought.
She is not as friendly as I was thinking.
Both the past simple and the past continuous tense refer to an action made in the past. Which tense should I use in the examples above and why?
Two examples:
She isn't as friendly as I thought.
She isn't as friendly as I was thinking.
I think both of these examples are gramatically correct depending on the context. In your first example, "I thought" refers to your thinking which existed in the past but doesn't exist in the present moment. In the same way, In your second example, 'I was thinking' also refers to your past-thinking but It's in continueous form. It means you were thinking in the past that she was friendly.
Both of examples could be understood as follows:
She isn't as friendly as I thought she was friendly.
She isn't as friendly as I was thinking she was friendly.
What I think the difference between these two examples is- In the first example, 'I thought' refers to simple past Tense and in the second example 'I was thinking' refers to past continueous Tense.
"as I was thinking" implies that the change in thinking occurred very recently, perhaps in the momentary past because of something that happened in the momentary past. E.g., "when I went to pay, I found I hadn't brought as much money as I was thinking I had": right up until I looked in my wallet (the disconfirming event), I was [still] thinking that I'd brought enough money for my purposes.
"as I thought" implies that the thought process had completed and some time had passed before the event occurred that made her seem not so friendly after all. E.g., "I thought [when I left the house, that] I had brought enough money with me. But it's not in my wallet -- where did it go?!?"