I agree with what you say. But instead of learning Toki Pona, you could also learn the 100 most common Chinese words and probably say as much as you can say in Toki Pona. If you study that list, you will see that just like in Toki Pona, many of the words have multiple meanings and can be used in multiple modes.

Of course, Chinese being a tonal language and the use of characters make it a lot harder than Toki Pona, but the number of people you can talk with, is a lot larger.

One of the problems that I had when learning Toki Pona, is that I did not have access to native speakers. Learning a language from a book is a lot harder than learning it through daily use. Recent studies have shown that adapt there language when they talk to their children and that that might be one of the reasons why children learn a language so seemingly without any effort.

I understand that for adults that is also te best method for learning a new language, having a native speaker that is able to adjust his language use to your comprehension of the language.