There has been a surge in the use of foreign language apps accessed by smartphones, according to a survey, with women in particular keen to be taught via their handset.

The study, carried out jointly by the country's leading Internet education provider Hujiang.com and the online education platform of Baidu Inc, shows the most popular customers are the female, college students or white-collar workers, under the age of 30 - a profile which accounted for 80 percent of users of the services.

In a sizeable snapshot of 25,000 users of Internet-based education products, 58.4 percent were women.