In the abstract? Probably. But in human domains I suspect you're unlikely to find something very amenable to this sort of approach without a lot of looking. I actually think he's better off just memorizing because the words are human words from human minds and just trusting to your own human mind is going to work better than a simple math approach.

The one thing I'd consider adding is memorizing the tuple (word, origin), because English's problem is that my first paragraph is simplified for English; we actually use many different distinct human patterns, and helping the brain partition the problem might be helpful.