17-­year­-old Elexis Webster grew up homeless with cruel family members and serious health problems. But Webster has got over these difficulties to become an honor student at her high school.

The teen spent her childhood living in dug outs(防空洞), cars, and any place where her family could find shelter. She was treated cruelly by her mother, a drug user, who left her and her sister alone without food for days. Her older brother disturbed her study too many tunes. Her poor living conditions led to her becoming extremely weak, which caused her to miss school often.

However, she got a 4. 1 GPA in the exam, though many wouldn't expect her to have such a hard life. Surviving in the family in an environment like that, she was able to come out of it, and she knew she had to make the best of what happened to her.

At 14, her mother was put in prison for leaving Webster and her sister in a car in the middle of a schoolday. The two girls were placed in foster care(寄养所)with a woman whom Webster still lives with. She calls her "Mema".

"Mema", who the teen sees as her mom, encouraged Webster as she returned school again. Even after missing three years of school, Webster was able to be excellent. Now Webster has planned to attend University of California at Los Angeles and study physics.

"I got to a place where I was able to keep going and push for higher than a 4. 1 and push to get into a really great college or university. I see success. I see happiness and I see peace, "she told KPIX 5.

Learning Chinese could be one of the most important decisions you ever make. Chinese is becoming the language to learn in the 21^st century. With the world's largest population and a rapidly growing middle class, China stands to become the engine of the world's economy in the coming years. This will make learning Chinese very important for people in many industries, or for those of us who wish to visit China or learn from its culture and history.

There is an ongoing effort to modernize the writing system and standardize the language. An increasing number of people learning Chinese are learning the Mandarin, so unless you absolutely need to learn another dialect (such as Cantonese), be sure you are studying Mandarin.

For native English speakers Chinese is one of the most difficult and most different languages to learn. The vocabulary is wholly unfamiliar and unlike anything we know. In addition, in the Chinese tone system, words are spoken in rising or falling tones, which help to distinguish between them. Furthermore, there is the Chinese writing system—a collection of thousands of individual ideograms (表意文字), or symbols, which represent a word or an idea. These ideograms have no phonetic value—that is to say, we can't tell how the word is pronounced by how it is written. There is a method to present written Chinese in a phonetic script called pinyin. If you are learning Chinese, you'll be working with this pinyin system, but the beauty of the traditional writing system shouldn't be passed up. All these factors make learning Chinese difficult for us. Yet, for a determined learner, there's always a way to overcome it.