At the core is one act: to acquire, to make a thing pass into your hands. The everyday face is buying (לִקְנוֹת), but the root reaches wider than money, you can also acquire a skill, a habit, a reputation. The causative לְהַקְנוֹת flips it to giving someone an acquisition: to impart, to instill (a teacher imbues a student with knowledge). And the shopping mall, קַנְיוֹן, is a modern coinage built straight on "buying". One root, from a loaf of bread to a whole education.
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.
Three live verbs map cleanly onto voice: pa'al = I acquire, nif'al = it gets acquired (passive), hif'il = I cause someone to acquire (to impart). The pi'el and the passives of the causative are not lexicalized 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.