This root is a small history of Hebrew itself. The letter aleph is its name; אֶלֶף is a thousand; and the verb לְאַלֵּף means to train, to tame, to make someone learn. The thread is teaching turned into mastery: the one trained to the top is the אַלּוּף, the champion or general, and the title he holds is אַלִּיפוּת, the championship. And this very word, ulpan (אֻלְפָּן), the intensive Hebrew course you may be sitting in, comes from the same root: a place of instruction. From aleph to fluency, one family. 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.
Modern Hebrew keeps the verb only in the pi'el לְאַלֵּף, the active, intensive verb of training and taming. The other binyanim are not lexicalized for this root, but the root's teaching sense lives on in nouns, including אֻלְפָּן (ulpan), the very word for an intensive language course.
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.