It's 12 letters, and there's a sort-of pattern in four groups of three with a rhythm. o-n-o, m-a-t, o-p-o, e-i-a. The first and third parts are like rhyming lines in a poem.
That's how I see it, anyway.
For the exact same reason I can see how your method works well as a means of teaching spelling by forcing native speakers to voice all the vowels that native speakers replace with the -schwa sound when pronouncing the full word.
Exploiting the technique above, start with a word in the language of the audience that share phonemes with your target word. From there you essentially play something similar to Lewis Carroll's "Doublets" game from the end to the beginning. So for the word "usually" I would usually start with the city in China, "Guanzhou" and proceed as follows (excuse my poor man's phonetic spelling):
Gwan-jo
Gwan-jo
Gwan-jo
Gwan-jo
Gwan-joooo
Gwan-joooo
Gwan-joooo
Gwan-joooo
Gwan-joooo-aaaa
Gwan-joooo-aaaa
Gwan-joooo-aaaa
Gwan-joooo-aaaa
Gwan-joo-a-lee
Gwan-joo-a-lee
Gwan-joo-a-lee
Gwan-joo-a-lee
joo-a-lee
joo-a-lee
joo-a-lee
joo-a-lee
yoo-joo-a-lee
yoo-joo-a-lee
yoo-joo-a-lee
yoo-joo-a-lee
Instead of learning a word like onomatopeia like this:
Try saying it out loud this way instead: This will almost always result in learning to pronounce the word much better. I say almost because there probably are words out there that violate this rule, but I haven't come across any of them yet. The reason this approach works is because the first syllable of almost all polysyllabic words in English is pronounced in a more drawn out fashion than the latter syllables. By learning from back to front, you force yourself to learn to draw out the first syllable and shorten up the last syllable(s).I have found that this rule is also applicable to almost all Romance languages for English speakers learning, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.
If you are a speaker of a second language, I strongly urge you to try this out yourself and get feedback from a native speaker on your pronunciation.