Suggestions for good touhou games to start with?

[Richard For Ponies]

I've always been curious about the series, but never really had the money to look into buying a lot of the games until recently, figured I'd poke at people who probably know more about it than me and see if anyone has suggestions for good 'first games to start with' for someone who's barely even looked at the series before.

Alas, I only know english, so english language support is a must D: or, language being irrelevant to figuring out how to play the game XD

[Crawling Chaos]

The thing is that Touhou is not just about games - there is a huge amount of official and fan made content. So you can actually get into the series without playing a single Touhou game, just by reading books, manga and articles on touhou wiki. However I would recommend playing this game (Touhou Luna Nights) at first. It is a fan made game. I do not know how this thing is called but basically creator of Touhou allows anyone to create any content using anything related to Touhou and make money from it. So there are many fan made games and these fan made games are obviously not canon because they are, well, fan made, but many of these games worth playing.
If you are interested in the official games you can either play all official games in chronological order or just play some of the ones that are easy for beginners. For example Touhou 7 - Perfect Cherry Blossom is very easy. However it is not available on Steam - because it was released in 2003 and the creator of Touhou does not really care about getting money from his games - not all of them are available for sale. But you can download these games on other websites. Yeah, technically it is a piracy, but firstly the game creator does not really care about money and secondly there is no other way of getting older games.
Another official simple game that gladly can be bought on Steam is Touhou 14 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1043240/Touhou_Kishinjou__Double_Dealing_Character/?curator_clanid=38552755
However it has no official English translation so you need to go there thpatch.net to download English patch.
Oh, yeah, also most of official games are Bullet Hell shooters - you need to fly and dodge multiple bullets that one-shot you. It is very fun but sometimes difficult that is why you should start with easy games.

[Richard For Ponies]

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥... '14'... I honestly don't know that there's a 'bigger' game series in the 'world' right now... at least not one that i've ever heard of o.o

Though with that advice, I might as well hunt down the originals and work my way through teh series then... not that I expect to know anything about lore XD

I'm also no stranger to the bullet hell genre, I just haven't gotten into the 'most in/famous bullet hell' yet XD

And yeah, I've played luna nights, though will again soon since i've heard about updates and additions. XD
I'll poke my nose through the fanmade games, and, good to know, that actually sounds like they're one of the best developers in the world too XD