This is how many languages works, but the spirit of Toki Pona is genuinely different (though many learners come in with the impression). Learning compound phrases won't really help you much.

One could say that the idea is to, if you have to refer to something in a given context, you try to cobble together a description, just enough to differentiate it from other things. "sike tu" (two circles) will be useful to differentiate a bicycle from a car, but if you want to differentiate them from a pair glasses you'll probably need to use a different term - "sike tawa" (moving circles) maybe! What you have to learn, instead of set compound phrases, is the ability to improvise names/descriptions for things on the fly :)