As an important element in the Chinese language, classifiers have become a hot issue in contemporary linguistics both at home and aboard. In the current study, a cognitive perspective is employed to investigate the nominal classifier system because classifiers provide a unique insight into the mechanisms of categorization of the world by human beings. This thesis firstly reviews a number of articles on this issue scattered over different publications, and then distinguishes two kinds of classifiers: measure ones for quantifying, and categorization ones for categorizing nouns according to their inherent properties or our interaction with them. The latter, which is the focus of this study, is further divided into three subclasses on a cognitive basis to reveal the basic means adopted by human beings in the process of turning the massive world into easy-to-perceive concepts. Based on this division system, a cognitive comparison between Chinese classifiers and English partitives was made in order to figure out what is there that is common or different in the way all human beings think.