There is a long history of language study in China.As early as in the fifth century B.C.,there were discussions about the nature of language,if we include the philosophical arguments of Lao Zi.The first dictionary Erya(《尔雅》) came out at least in the second century B.C.The more modern dictionary Shuowen Jiezi(《说文解字》),which not only provided explanations of meaning and pronunciation,but also explorations on the relation between sound and form of writing,was published in 121 A.D.Yet some people claim there were no grammatical studies in ancient China.Why? In what ways is Shuowen Jiezi different from works like Technē Grammatikē by Dionysius Thrax? What caused the differences in their approaches to language? In order to find answers to these questions,the author of this paper made a comparative study of Technē Grammatikē and Shuowen Jiezi.He discovered that these two works were meant to serve the same purposes,and Dionysius and Xu Shen did their studies in the same way,concentrating on the basic unit in their respective languages.The major difference between Technē Grammatikē and Shuowen Jiezi,the author argues,lies in the structural difference between Greek and Chinese: the former is structurally composed of words (at least this was the view of Dionysius at that time) while the latter of zi(字),Chinese characters.It is easy and convenient to break Greek words down into roots and affixes,the knowledge of which is referred to as morphology,on which the whole edifice of grammar in the West was built.In contrast,it is only possible to analyze Chinese characters in terms of radicals,or constituent strokes.These differences may be attributed to the different ways of writing in the two languages.But the author believes that the Chinese way of writing must be rooted in the Chinese language and has served its purposes well|otherwise it would not have such strong vitality and become the only ancient writing system in the world which is still in use today.