La bomba dañó el edificio.

Because Spanish nouns have grammatical gender.

• bomba is a feminine noun, so it takes la
• edificio is a masculine noun, so it takes el

This gender is grammatical, not about whether the thing is literally male or female.

Dañó is the preterite form of dañar, used for a completed action in the past.

So La bomba dañó el edificio means the damaging happened as a finished event.

Compare:

• dañó = damaged
• daña = damages / is damaging
• dañaba = was damaging / used to damage

In this sentence, the preterite is the natural choice because it describes a single completed event.

The accent mark shows where the stress goes and also helps identify the verb form.

• dañó is stressed on the last syllable: da-ÑÓ
• Without the accent, dano would not be the correct spelling here

The accent is important because it marks this as the third-person singular preterite form: he/she/it damaged.

Ñ is pronounced like the ny sound in English words such as canyon.

So dañó sounds roughly like dah-NYO.

It is a separate letter in Spanish, not just an n with a mark on it.

Spanish often uses articles in places where English sometimes leaves them out or chooses differently.

Here, el edificio means the building. It suggests a specific building, or a building already understood from context.

If you wanted a building, you would usually say:

• La bomba dañó un edificio = The bomb damaged a building

So el matters: it makes the noun definite.

Because the personal a is normally used before specific human beings (and sometimes pets or personified beings), not things.

Here, el edificio is an object, not a person, so there is no personal a.

Compare:

• Veo el edificio = I see the building
• Veo a María = I see María

The normal, most neutral order is:

• La bomba dañó el edificio

That is subject + verb + object.

Spanish word order is more flexible than English, so other orders are possible, but they usually sound marked, emphatic, or less natural in isolation.

For example:

• El edificio fue dañado por la bomba = The building was damaged by the bomb

That is a passive-style version and is grammatically correct, but the original active sentence is simpler and more common.

Not exactly.

Dañar means to damage or to harm, not necessarily to destroy completely.

So:

• La bomba dañó el edificio = The bomb damaged the building

If you wanted destroyed, you might use:

• La bomba destruyó el edificio = The bomb destroyed the building

So dañar is less extreme than destruir.

Yes. Bomba can also mean pump in some contexts.

For example:

• bomba de agua = water pump

But in La bomba dañó el edificio, the context strongly suggests bomb, not pump.

Yes. Spanish verb forms often do not show an explicit subject pronoun, so dañó could mean:

• he damaged
• she damaged
• it damaged

Here, the noun La bomba tells you the subject is it: the bomb.

A simple approximation is:

• lah BOM-bah dah-NYO el eh-dee-FEE-syo

A few notes:

• b in bomba is softer than a strong English b in many contexts
• ñ in dañó sounds like ny
• ó is stressed on the last syllable of dañó
• c is not involved here, so there is no special Spain-only th sound to worry about in this sentence

Not normally in this sentence.

Spanish usually needs the articles here:

• La bomba dañó el edificio

Leaving them out would sound unnatural or incorrect in standard Spanish unless you were using a headline style or a very special context.

So for normal speech and writing, keep la and el.