Three consonants carry one of Hebrew's deepest ideas. ד־ב־ר is speaking, but its central noun, דָּבָר, means both "word" and "thing". In this root a word and a thing are the same: to say something is to make it real. Pour the letters into a verb mould and you get an act of speech; into a noun mould and you get the speaker, the speech, a commandment, even the desert where one place could be reached only by a spoken word. None of the words below are memorized separately. They are the same three letters seen from different angles. Every word here is verified against pealim, niqqud included.
The same root runs through the verb system. Each binyan is a voice: it bends the one idea into active, passive, causative or reciprocal. Tap to hear.
The everyday verb "to speak" is the pi'el דִּבֵּר, not a pa'al, the simple pa'al is not lexicalized for this root. Notice the pair: nif'al (להידבר, to reach agreement) and hitpa'el (להידבר, to talk it through) share almost the same form and the reciprocal idea of two parties exchanging words. The hif'il drifts to a harder sense, to subdue, the way a word can also command.
Same root letters, different noun moulds (mishkalim). The mould tells you the function: who does it, the act of doing it, or the thing produced.
Strip the prefixes, suffixes and vowels. Three consonants remain, and the meaning lives there.