Four years ago Fatema Kharbotli barely spoke English.
And when it came to the accent in her new home city she understood even less.
Today the Salford schoolgirl has eight GCSEs and dreams of becoming a doctor.
Her incredible results include top-rank grade 9s in biology and Arabic and a pair of English GCSEs.
Fatema and her family first fled the civil war in Syria in 2013, moving to neighbouring Iraq.
Hoping the situation had improved, after two years away they moved back to their home city of Damascus.
But the war, which began in 2011 and is thought to have cost 400,000 lives, was still raging.
So Fatema's mum, a biology teacher, and her dad, a maths teacher, made the difficult decision to seek refuge in the UK, arriving in Salford in 2016.
Speaking in the playground of Buile Hill Academy in Pendleton shortly after she collected her results on Thursday morning, Fatema told how even as a small child she understood some of the horror her home country was facing.
She said: "I spent nine years in Syria, then two years away in Iraq.
"I had to experience being away from family and friends which was hard, but it's nothing compared to what a lot of people in Syria have experienced.
"The war started when I was a child. At that age you're not really conscious of what's happening around you, but you have an idea and that was enough to scare me and make me want to move away."
When she arrived in Salford Fatema spoke little English, but soon got a crash course in the local accent.
She said: "Learning to speak English in another country is completely different to actually speaking it here.
"When we first got here I couldn't understand the accent at all. It was like 'what?'."
Given the upheaval she's already suffered in her young life it's perhaps not surprising she took lockdown in her stride.
She started learning sign language, got a part-time job in a GP practice and and worked as a dance teacher at a summer club.
Fatema, who is now going to study A Levels in biology, chemistry and Spanish at Loreto College in Hulme with the aim of going into medicine, said: "I wasn't really stressed [about school being closed and exams being cancelled].
"I was only stressed about the English - that was the only thing I wasn't happy with.
"But I am really proud of myself."
