More young Chinese have switched from studying English in the classroom to the palms of their hands, an emerging trend created by various apps such as Liulishuo and Baicizhan. [Photo provided to China Daily]

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English is one of the most highly emphasized subjects both in school and at home in China, and, a good mastery of English is highly valued by employers in the country's job market.

Ma is just one of the many young Chinese who have switched from studying English in the classroom to the palms of their hands, an emerging trend created by various apps such as Liulishuo and Baicizhan.

Among the education apps in Apple's app store in China, English learning apps make up half of the slots of top 10 paid-for apps, and four slots in the list of top 20 free apps.

Baicizhan, which helps people remember words, is the most popular free app in the Apple store, receiving 15,800 comments from users, followed by Liulishuo, which has 5,600 comments.

Wang Yi, CEO of Liulishuo, claims that almost 1 million people are using their advanced auto-scoring engine of spoken English developed in Silicon Valley, half of whom are from the post-1990's generation.

Wang, a former product manager at Google who returned to China in 2012, found that despite Chinese students' ability to achieve high grades in written tests, most of them could not match the equivalent score when it came to tests in spoken English.

"This presents a problem," says Wang. "It is mainly caused by the traditional teaching methodology in which a single teacher faces a class of at least 30 students, making it impossible for teachers to give professional advice to every student. And the expense of having a private teacher is too high for most families."

So, Wang and his partners began to work on a smartphone app that uses artificial intelligence to provide self-paced mobile language courses that cater to a wide range of users, from beginners to advanced learners.

In July 2016, Liulishuo introduced the app－an AI English teacher－to its users, with charges ranging between 99 and 966 yuan.