"Today is the beginning of a new era in language psychology. Today is the day where the greatest linguistics project ever will start. Today will be a day remembered forever in the yearbooks of history. Because today, today, is the day where I will begin the Project Disassemble Ping.
Why do I start this project? Very simple. Piro has been missing all night long, and I figured out that Ping, that freaky robot girl he hangs out with all the time, would know where he is. But Ping, unfortunately, can only speak the Undead Queen's arcane, 3vil tongue. So it was my job to make myself understand. I used the same tactic that most language teachers use to jump start the knowledge of a completely unknown language: a combination of very simple phrases and a lot of gesticulation.
Little did I know, that the humanoid robotic device Sony SCPH-18333, codename "Ping", was actually learning English like a normal human. I found out shortly after she managed to tell me where did Piro went. Most modern speech recognition systems have a hard-coded vocabulary that reads a word and does whatever that word means, like a command shell. Ping, however, has a vocabulary with words mapped to concepts. Like a normal human brain. I also discovered, by the speed with which she grasped the basic English grammar, that she has a set of built-in grammar rules that she just has to alter in order to learn a language. Like a young child.
Many linguists have been endlessly working during many years to do that, and now the engineers at Sony managed to do it. Perhaps they did it in case they decided to launch it overseas: it would be much easier to just upload the language rules into a whole freight intended to be sold at a certain place, than to write separate languages for each locale. That would be really expensive, because although the languages of the Second World are pretty much limited to Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Hebrew, the tongues of the First World includes Chinese, English, French, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Norwegian, Italian, Icelandic and many other languages.
But they still created the language rules that a small child has inside his head! They followed the inverse path: instead of finding the rules, they created them. And they gotta be quite natural to allow Ping to learn English.
I can't still count everything that discovery implies. The language learning market is flooded with language methods that all claim to be superior to the rest; this would be a major innovation, because it would allow for a completely seamless and intuitive method. The language rules could be converted into computer code, and be used to build an automatic translation system that could actually create a translation that actually looks human, not like a Babelfish translation.
But the 2 biggest possibilities are: the creation of a truly universal language, and the creation of an universal translation system! Instant translation would be possible! Imagine being able to talk with Kimiko over the cell phone. She would speak the Undead Queen's tongue, but I would not listen to her 3vil words; instead, I would listen a righteous English speech. She would not hear me speaking English; she would hear me speak the 3vil language! Oh my God, I shall become filthy rich!
The first thing I will do, in order to grasp the knowledge of Ping's language system, will be to write her an English module. Not only it would allow me to communicate with her, it might even allow me to make her tell me her inner structure and composition. Then I will start reverse-engineering her programming, analyze it with the help of a linguist, and finally, we both would publish the Universal Language Rules. We will become the top authorities of the linguistics community! We shall be heard of all around the Globe! We will be awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes! And guess what I'm gonna do with them? I will organize the Ultimate Videogame Convention: better than the E3, because it will have trainloads of b33r: a convention during the day, and a wild party during the night, with gallons and gallons of booze and hostesses showing her titties! Wild party girls will be attracted to it, and it shall become the biggest convention ever! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"