Turn the question around: what is unintuitive about it?

^ This. Honestly, actually following this advice on all of your intuition questions would improve most of them substantially.

But note that these are not examples of following this advice: ‘I don't understand.’ ‘How can this be?’ ‘This is sortilege!’

Instead:

• Connect the thing you're asking about to something you do find intuitive, but that works differently, and ask for an explanation of the difference.

• Come up with an example of the thing you're asking about, but that doesn't work the way you'd expect, and ask where the mistake is.

• Try to translate your soft intuitions into logical principles you can clearly communicate, and ask under what conditions those principles do and don't apply.

Note that all of the above not only make questions better, they also require you to spend more time thinking about and working with the concepts, which will improve your understanding all by itself. Not doing anything like the above is what we mean when we call questions low-effort.

I would be weary of this sort of explanation. If you have a property which you do not find intuitive, but also not counter-intuitive, then you are ... just stuck. So I do think, if the job is to give intuition, you really need to give the intuition, and not just turn it around on the student.

whybecause‭, if you have a property which you do not find intuitive or counter-intuitive then you need a very good reason for believing that it should be intuitive to justify the question. Axioms and definitions are chosen and become popular because they're useful, with no guarantees about how intuitive their consequences are or should be. Most of the time, what we mean by "intuition" in mathematics is experience, and even experienced mathematicians sometimes find that their intuition is wrong.

Peter Taylor‭ I think the point you're making, which I would agree with, is that not all things can be made intuitive. That's right, and it's right to point that out to a student, in such cases.