Anyone know which is most common, whether they differ in meanings, or if both are correct? I'm not finding anything explanatory in the usual dictionary searches.

I asked my Chinese friend and they said it's jìnliàng. The 3rd tone version of 尽 is for different words.

This is the entry in Wenlin dictionary:

尽[盡] ⁴jìn adv. ①to the utmost/limit ②always ◆v. ①end ②use up; exhaust ③try one's best; put to best use ◆pr. all
尽[儘] ²jǐn adv. ①to the greatest extent | ∼ nǐ chī. Eat as much as you can. ②utmost ◆v. ①give priority to ②〈topo.〉 keep on doing sth. ◆cov. within the limits of


Two full forms 盡 jìn and 儘 jǐn are distinguished, 儘 with the addition of 亻(人 rén) being used when the pronounciation is jǐn. Jìn and jǐn are cognate words. There is only one simple form 尽.

My dictionary has jin4liang4: (drink or eat) to the full, jin3liang4: to the best of one's ability; as far as possible

Summary of the bit below ------: none of the online dictionaries I could find were much help, and most of the Chinese-Chinese dictionaries online seem to use the same source data (I guess it's 新华), so if the first one doesn't help you're out of luck.

After I looked at all the dictionaries, I found an article on 多音字:

http://www.itkhl.com/Article/dnaq/itkhl-326.html

The relevant excerpt:

再举个例子：“尽jin4量（动词）”和“尽jin3量（副词）”。读“尽jin4量”的场合只有在饭桌上：“你是吃4两饭的，怎么才吃3两？你没尽量！”“（酒）不能喝了，我已经喝得尽量了。”其它的所有场合都应该用“尽jin3量”。

Translating, jin4liang4 is a verb, jin3liang4 is an adverb, jin4liang4 is only used at the dinner table (i.e. things to do with food)： "You've eaten 200 grams of rice, how can you eat 150 grams more? You've not eaten your full!", (alcohol) "I can't drink it, I've drunk all I can." All other situations you should use jin3liang4. So that looks to be your answer.

Incidentally there is a person on tianya asking about the
pronunciations of 尽. Assuming they're Chinese, that makes me feel a bit better about struggling with these.

http://wenda.tianya.cn/wenda/thread?tid=45b6c739328fe216


------



尽量
jìnliàng
〖tothefull〗达到最大限量
你有什么困难,我们尽量帮助解决

尽量
jǐnliàng
〖tothebestofone'sability〗在某个范围内达到最大限度
请大家尽量发表意见

(Definitions from erong.) Those definitions sounds pretty similar to me.

Zhongwen.com has "as hard as one can" for both.

Nciku has do all one can [我尽量不麻烦别人。], (drink or eat) to the full, 达到最高程度 [饭要吃饱，酒不要尽量。] for jin4liang4 for the c-e, comp. c-e, and c-c respectively. They're generally pretty bad on 多音字 though, and the pinyin popup for the c-e has jin3liang4 instead of jin4liang4.

For jin3liang4 they have to the best of one’s ability [你尽量早点来。], to the best of one's ability; as far as possible [尽量采用先进技术], and 表示动作行为力求达到最大限度
[文章要尽量写得通俗些] [凡是有利的条件，尽量加以利用。].

Just looking at these, jin3liang4 seems more common.

MDBG and dict.cn both only have jin4liang4, so I don't trust them on this one.

Baidu was almost identical to erong, but with a couple of extra examples that don't add much: http://dict.baidu.com/s?wd=%BE%A1%C1%BF&f=3 .

zdic.net was the same:

http://www.zdic.net/cd/ci/6/ZdicE5ZdicB0ZdicBD335494.htm

www.iciba.com was worse. dict.youdao.com and hudong.com also have the same source as baidu and zdic. zh.wiktionary.org didn't even have it. ourdict.cn had encoding trouble. http://xh.5156edu.com/ was identical to erong. It claims to be based off xinhua.

I also looked at the Kangxizidian.com.

See bottom right of

http://www.kangxizidian.com/kangxi/0120.gif

for 儘 (it says see 盡). For 盡 see bottom left of

http://www.kangxizidian.com/kangxi/0795.gif

And for 尽 see middle right of

http://www.kangxizidian.com/kangxi/0300.gif

I think it says something about being a common version of 盡.

Apart from 儘's "see 盡" I can't really understand this. Maybe somebody else can. I also don't know the significance for modern Chinese.

Wow, thanks for the digging.

I Googled:
儘量 什麼 - 36M hits
盡量 什麼 - 104M hits

So it seems like 盡 is the more common, and if we go by Wenlin, then it seems like the first definition and accepted reading should be:
jin4liang4: eat or drink to one's fill.

Then the best we can do for jin3liang4 is to mod the definition like so:

eat or drink to one's fill, (jin3-: as much as possible; to the best of one's ability)

It's too bad, though, because the ChinesePod audio file just has jin3liang4.

Can anyone else weigh in?

From the library, I found a book named 普通话水平测试大纲 published by 吉林人民出版社 in 2006, which is the syllabus for the native Chinese studying for their Putonhua proficiency test. In this book, there are two tables listing the words to be studied with their respective pinyin. Table 1 contains 8438 entries which are the same as those listed in HSK1 – HSK4. Table 2 contains 15418 more difficult words. 尽jin3量 appeared in table 1, while 尽jin4量 appeared in table 2. So this suggests to me that 尽jin3量 is more commonly used and should be mastered before 尽jin4量.

Wow sounds like a good library. I'm guessing you're in China?