There's no real /right/ way to program AI. There's probably a lot of college-level theory and research done on it that has probably learned some useful stuff, but there's really no barriers to you just figuring it out yourself.
I'd start by trying to make a chatterbot. Program something in BASIC or C++ that takes input from the person, tries to figure it what it's saying, and then outputs a response. The syntax for that shouldn't be that hard, and after about 4 hours of work you should probably have something that can take a sentence from you and decode the grammar and separate the words in it.