One verb, לאפות (to bake), spins off a clean little world: the baker who does it (אופה), the act of baking (אפייה) and the pastry that results (מאפה). Learn the root and the bakery names itself. The same three letters also carry a second, abstract sense in Hebrew, a person's character (אופי) and what is characteristic of them (אופייני): the stamp baked into who someone is. 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.
Only the pa'al "to bake" is lexicalized as a verb. Everything else in this family is a noun or an adjective spun off it, so this root lives mostly outside the binyan system. Nif'al, pi'el, pu'al, hif'il, huf'al and hitpa'el are not used here.
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.