I've had a tiny bit of success. A lot of the time a word like "tititi" refers to something small, and "bububu" refers to something big. Also "pa" or something like that often means "no" and "yeeee" means "yes". Usually I have to rely on knowing "Oh, that's from Arabic". And for the record, I don't know of any language where dogs are called "woof". "Bu", certainly.
A nifty test (which can be performed if you have a captive audience of undergraduates in an intro linguistics class) is to present them with random words in languages that they almost certainly don't know, and see how good they are at guessing the meaning. Don't use Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Hindi... go for a mix of X!oo, Kurmanji, Mien, Kartvelian, Navaho.