This is comically incorrect. Even the article plainly states that you need to know ~1500 characters to be considered literate in Chinese, with sixth graders required to learn ~2500 characters. A quick perusal of practically any Chinese-language website (e.g. https://zh.wikipedia.org/) will quickly disabuse you of the notion that there are "only 200+ Chinese ideograms".
You might be conflating "ideogram" with "radical", i.e. components of characters. There's probably a few hundred of those defined, but they're more like pieces of characters rather than whole ones. Combining radicals produces very different characters that have totally different meanings; learning the radicals alone buys you very little.
There are thousands of characters, and you have to know thousands. There are tens of thousands of characters in existence, although only highly educated folks will know anywhere near 10000 characters.
Um, no. If you're talking about radicals (of which there are generally considered to be 214), yes, but you can't read / write in general if you only know those. Also, of those 214, a good chunk aren't standalone words. You're never going to see 疒 or 丶 by itself.
You won't have the words for "I" or "you". You might be able to read "melon" but not "fruit". You could read "papaya" and "corn" but not "vegetable". You could read "beef" or "lamb" but not "chicken". You could read "small" but not "few". You wouldn't be able to read "hello" or "goodbye", "happy" or "sad". But you'd be able to count 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20...
The fact that characters are made up of radicals does make them easier to learn, though. There are ~2000 characters in the core vocabulary, sure - but it's not like you have to learn to write every one of them individually, just like you don't have to learn the spelling of every English word from scratch. There's common patterns.
Learning the radicals is maybe the first 10% of the effort in learning how to read and write Chinese.
After that, you still have to learn how to combine the radicals in pretty much arbitrary ways to form several thousand characters. The way you combine them is sometimes related to the sound and/or meaning of the radicals, but it's not systematic at all.
The grandparent comment is massively downplaying the difficulty involved in learning to read and write Chinese.
That's understating the actual number of distinct components you need to know, but even so, just memorizing the individual ideograms still isn't enough to allow you to read Chinese with meaningful fluency.
Since the sound changes that had taken place over the two to three thousand
years since the Old Chinese period have been extensive, in some instances,
the phono-semantic natures of some compound characters have been
obliterated, with the phonetic component providing no useful phonetic
information at all in the modern language. For instance, 逾 (yú; /y³⁵/;
'exceed'), 輸 (shū; /ʂu⁵⁵/; 'lose', 'donate'), 偷 (tōu; /tʰoʊ̯⁵⁵/; 'steal',
'get by') share the phonetic 俞 (yú; /y³⁵/; 'agree') but their
pronunciations bear no resemblance to each other in Standard Chinese or any
other variety.
Or, consider 亭 (ting2), 叮 (ding1), 成 (cheng2), 打 (da3) which all supposedly derive their sound from 丁 (ding1) per the analysis at https://github.com/cjkvi/cjkvi-ids/. You can't just memorize the components and read all of these as "ding".
And beyond that, that doesn't help with being able to write. You can't just say "oh, I don't remember exactly how to write this word, but I'm just going to throw in some ideograph with the right phonetic component next to the radical and my reader will just know what I mean." You can't just take 瓦 (pottery) + 平 (ping2) to invent the word for vase. 瓶 (ping2) instead uses 并 (bing1), not to be confused with 井 (jing3).
I'd say thousands of ideograms composed by hundreds of logograms, and you can be both right (this is actually a very reduced view of what logogram is, but English is quite imprecise on this).
